


A Hundred Places Where I Fear to Go

by andloawhatsit



Category: Kings
Genre: Adoption, Boys Kissing, Freedom, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Panic Attacks, Parenthood, Past Relationship(s), Personal Growth, Post-Canon, Revolution, Siblings, Suicide, changing for the better, chosen families, friendship is an anchor, past illness, people talking through their feelings, trying to address what Kings left hanging, women characters that deserved better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-17
Updated: 2014-08-17
Packaged: 2018-02-13 13:02:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2151693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andloawhatsit/pseuds/andloawhatsit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A year after the series end-point, Michelle and David plan a revolution, her return from exile, and Jack and Lucinda's rescue—But what comes after for David, for Gilboa, for all of them?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Shepherd

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bisexualstevenrogers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bisexualstevenrogers/gifts).



There are a hundred places where I fear  
To go,—so with his memory they brim.  
And entering with relief some quiet place  
Where never fell his foot or shone his face  
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”  
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.  
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

* * *

 

_“Then said David to the Philistine, Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord.” (1 Samuel 17:45)_

 

Michelle pushed a photograph across the table, the picture showing a chubby infant in a powder-blue sleeper. The child’s blonde hair spiked hedgehog-like; her tongue stuck out and she lay on her back. Fists clenched and knees bent, she was learning to move through the world, and David said softly, overwhelmed, “Fuck,” and turned his head away. Rubbed his jaw. It was the first time he had seen Michelle’s daughter. Their daughter. 

Michelle laughed. Wrapped her hands around her mug and brought her coffee to her lips. Said after a sip, “Yes, David, that _is_ how it works. Gold star for you.” She waved a hand at him. “That copy’s for you, but be careful—I know how you are with dangerous photographs.”

He looked up, protesting—“I didn’t _lose_ that camera, it was _stolen_ ”—but found Michelle grinning behind her small hand.

“Only teasing,” she said. “Touchy.”

He gave up the argument and looked back at the photograph— _Elizah Rose_ , named for his brother and Michelle’s mother—and tried to find himself in her features. The blonde hair, of course, thick and the colour of dry sand, but was that all? Did she have his eyes? She had Michelle’s nose, for certain—small, delicate—but was his own mother there? Would Jessie ever know she had a granddaughter? 

“I should have come back,” he said. He had crossed the border into Gilboa the night before, after a year in hiding in Gath, called by Michelle who had not once before asked him to risk the journey. Disguised (bearded, hair dyed a muddy brown, and wearing what his brother Eli would have called _douchebag glasses,_ thin-framed and wide-lensed sunspecs), he had walked through the back garden to tap lightly at her patio door. The memory of Michelle at the door of his Shiloh flat—bright-eyed and full of hope, before everything went wrong—pulsed in his mind, and when she answered, he tried to remember what he wanted to say, but managed only a dry-throated, “Hi.” 

She had lifted herself on her toes, kissed his cheek, and said she hadn’t been sure he would come. 

“What else,” he had said, confused, “could I have done?”

 

At the kitchen table, with two cups of coffee and a picture of their child between them, Michelle shook her head. “It’s better this way,” she said. To either side, sat her best friends, Merab and her wife, Hannah, both of whom had followed her into exile and whom David was meeting for the first time, though Michelle had often spoken of them.

The fading sunlight smouldered against the gauzy yellow curtains and pale walls. He looked at Michelle, then at his mug.

“For all of us, I mean,” said Michelle.

“Gilboa wasn’t safe for you,” said Merab, pushing her tight black curls back from her forehead, and Hannah added, “It still isn’t.” A slight, blonde woman—a former army nurse, now a doula—she wore intensity and (despite her size) was someone David wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.

“Exactly,” said Michelle, “and I wanted—”

“To be alone?” He could understand that. Adrift in the wreckage of her family, why wouldn’t she have wanted to raise Elizah outside Shiloh’s poisonous intrigue? Bent on revenge, Silas had thrown himself into reconsolidating his power, with Rose at his right hand and Thomasina at his left, while Lucinda and Jack remained trapped—But he didn’t want to think of Jack. Didn’t, certainly, want to think of the last time he and Jack had spoken. Their last embrace, the strength of it. The luminescent hint of the person Jack _could_ be.

“David? Are you listening?” Irritation rode high in Merab’s voice, and she glowered at him while Hannah reached across the table to pat her hand, wearing a friendly smirk when she eyed David. He hoped his face hadn’t shown his distraction.

“I wanted,” said Michelle, “time and space to think and plan.”

“Plan?”

She huffed and thumped her coffee cup down against the table. “What do you think we’ve been doing out here _alone_ for the past twelve months? Knitting booties? I know you’ve been getting our messages, and Merab and Hannah are risking their lives just to meet with me, much less what they’ve actually done, and—”

“It’s alright,” said Hannah. She tucked her hair behind her ears. “Girls, it’s alright—We all want the same thing, remember?” She turned to David. “But you—Did you really think we’d sit here with our thumbs up our asses waiting for you to get back?” Pausing to dart a quick look for Michelle’s approval, Hannah coughed, then continued. “I know what you’ve done in Gath and I’m grateful, we all are, but you’re not the only one calling the shots here.”

“But Elizah—”

“This is _for_ Elizah,” said Michelle, firmly. “My exile is nearly over, David. They’ll call me back soon and I’m going to make Shiloh beautiful for her, but it’s more than that, too—We’ve _talked_ about this.”

The three women stared him down, stronger together. _More like sisters_ , Michelle had often said. _Especially after I was sick._ Abandoning their Shiloh lives, Merab and Hanna had secretly taken a small cabin on the other side of the lake, supporting Michelle in her exile and serving, too, as David’s link to Gilboa. Communicating in code through the newspaper classifieds and in fragmented notes left in assorted postboxes, the four had dreamed of all they might do: Michelle’s plans for healthcare reform, peace treaties with Gath, demilitarisation, farming subsidies, arts programming, education grants.

“I know,” he said, “but it’s been talking, just _talking,_ for so long, and then out of the blue, you call me in and you say, ‘Now!’ What am I supposed to do? Ruth is already jumpy.” He had spent the better part of his time in Gath building a fragile partnership with Ruth Naphtali. Formerly Shiloh City University’s star professor of political science, she was now the expat leader of the Coalition, an underground reformist movement, and they needed her.

“The Coalition has been waiting for their chance,” said Michelle. “Well, this is it, it’s time to move, and—”

“What about Lucinda and Jack?”

Merab and Hannah exchanged a look, and Michelle said, “What about them?”

“Haven’t you talked to him?” The Benjamin twins weren’t close, but David found it hard to believe that Michelle could have let Jack rot without a word—And yet, all that year she’d said nothing, no matter how he tried to dig for news.  “He’s your _twin_ , Michelle, and—”

“Don’t lecture me,” she said. “He threatened to have Rose and I shot, did you know that?”

He hadn’t, and slumped back in his chair. Rubbed his jaw again, conscious of the nervous tic but unable to preempt it.

“My uncle played him,” said Michelle, “but he should have known better. That desperate, selfish idiot.” She topped up her cup angrily, coffee sloshing over the rim.

“But I—” David stumbled over his words. “I only meant—We need him. Ruth won’t back your play without both Benjamins on board.” He hesitated, then, but only for a moment before he hooked his little finger over hers and gave her hand what he hoped was a reassuring shake. “I get it,” he said. “You know I do—Ethan—” His brother, too, had tried insurrection, threatened to shoot Michelle; the schism it had left through the Shepherd family remained unhealed. David had sent his mother a single letter before leaving Gilboa. Anything further was too dangerous, but he needed her to know he was alive, even if she and her brothers still refused to see him.

Michelle pulled away and said, “Merab, can you get me the clippings?”

Merab stood and went to the counter, then rifled through the drawers until she found a plastic snap-top folder. This she shook out over the tabletop, spreading a flutter of newsprint like greyscale butterflies. “I’ve collected these over the past year, she said, fanning the cuttings across the table. “Most of them are gossip headlines and paparazzi shots”—she pulled some from the pile to make her point, grainy photos of Jack and Lucinda, shot at a distance—“because Jack was always an e-news industry until himself.”

“Him and Lu,” said Michelle, “baby-bump speculations, will there be a royal wedding, post-coup will there still _be_ a wedding—That sort of thing.” 

David hadn’t heard anything about a wedding.

“They might have married already,” Hannah interjected, “but if they have, it’s not public knowledge—It’s only Silas angling for a controlled succession.” She sighed. “Poor Lucinda.”

David had only met the bright, pretty woman once or twice, in passing; as far as he knew, she’d done nothing to deserve sharing Jack’s punishment, and even for Jack, whose selfish desperation to please and to prove himself had brought national disaster, he was sympathetic. His skin crawled at the thought of that kind of imprisonment; at least Michelle had the open sky and her friends. And Elizah.

“Poor Lu, indeed,” said Michelle. “I guarantee Silas doesn’t give a fuck about her, he’s just keeping her there to punish Jack.”

“Punish him? Why?” While he regretted Lucinda’s entanglement in the Benjamin family—what conversations the two of them could have!—he had been glad that if it had to be, at least Jack was not alone. “Wouldn’t he like to have her there, if nothing else?”

Merab looked away, rubbing her throat, and Michelle looked startled, then incredulous, that subtle disappointment she wore when David failed to understand something she took for granted. “He’s not so fond of her,” she said at last. “It would have been, maybe will be, still, a marriage of convenience.”

“But Elizah,” said David, distracted by thoughts of the royal succession. “She’s safe?”

“We put my name on her birth certificate,” said Hannah. “Father unknown.”

“Thank you,” he said, “though I’m sorry you had to do that.”

“Don’t be,” said Michelle, with a wry smile, draining the last of her coffee. “It was my idea and it keeps her safe—And trust me, you don’t want her to be a princess.” She loosened her ponytail, shook out her hair, then put it up again. “The point is that I heard _nothing_ about Jack except gossip”—she tapped the clippings pile—“and the occasional serious article that I assume Silas permits, the better to disguise his death-grip on the so-called free press.”

One of the clippings, a glossy and ragged-edged page torn from a news magazine, caught David’s eye. The headline: _Inside the Prince’s isolation: Medical expert argues royal confinement tantamount to psychological torture, King responds that “the family is healing.”_  

“Then,” said Michelle, “three weeks ago, Merab brought me this.” She handed David a postcard printed with the palace gates, metal gleaming on a sunny day, two crisp-suited guards standing to attention at each side. He peered closer, thinking he recognised Boyden and Klotz, the guards who had helped him escape Cross, but Michelle said impatiently, “The picture’s not the point.”

Scrawled on the back was a brief message. _He needs your help to rescue her. He’s desperate. —A friend._

“It’s not Jack’s writing,” said Michelle, “but it turned up in Merab’s Shiloh postbox, so whoever sent it knows enough to connect her to me.” She bundled the postcard and clippings back into their folder. “So it’s either a set-up, to expose Merab as a “traitor,” or it’s sincere and Jack is more desperate than I anticipated.” She shrugged. “The boy hasn’t asked me for help,—not with a single thing—since we were kids. Before I got sick.”

“We need to consider the possibility that it’s not him,” said Merab, returning the folder to its drawer, “Anyone could have put it there.”

“Exactly,” said David, relieved that Merab seemed to talk sense. “There’s nothing to say the card came from him, or what kind of game he might be playing, what he’s been up to since the coup—We can’t throw away everything we’ve worked on for a feeling.” He sighed. “And we have no way of reaching him—Unless you do? Ruth hasn’t been able to plant any of her people in his guard.”

Merab shook her head.

“But he’s not asking for help for himself,” said Michelle, “and he seems to have had to ask through someone else.”

“Even more out of character,” said Merab. “But regardless, we’re better served with Jack as _our_ asset, than tied up as Silas’s chewtoy. More to the point, if we want to really kick Silas in the teeth, then we take his prize—Jack—and give him back to the people.”

Hannah rolled her eyes.

Merab fixed her with a gentle glare and said, “I _know_ —But it’s true, they love him.”

Not for the first time, David tried to order the mass of contradictions comprising his memories of Jack Benjamin. 

First: _beneath a black hood, the soldier with bound hands and eyes like ice, ready to die, no fear, the Prince_. 

Second: _Jack drinking, dancing, pulling a girl onto his lap_. 

Third: _Jack on the club floor, struck and standing up, struck and standing up, punch after punch and hissing,_ Fight me _, through a mouthful of blood._

Fourth: _Jack pulling him into an embrace, the startling warmth and sincerity of it, the realisation of what he looked like outside Silas’s long shadow_. 

Fifth: _Jack sitting silently at the centre of Unity Hall while William Cross shot a minister in the head, choosing just which costs he could bear for which returns._

Sixth: _Jack stippled in grey newsprint, caught by the paparazzi and reaching out over the balcony’s edge, eyes wide and mouth open in surprise while Lucinda turned away with her arms folded, as distant as she could manage._

“Hell,” he said. “God knows I’ve done stupider things for _my_ brothers. Why not add yours to the mix?” The women stared at him and he looked back at Michelle. “I mean it,” he said. “We need to get him, so we might as well get to it.”

She smiled, small and soft. “We’ve been in contact with Lucinda’s family—They’re not permitted to speak to her directly and they’re not even sure their letters get through, but the Wolfsons command a good chunk of change as well as general Shiloh social capital, and they’re desperate to see their oldest daughter safe.” She pushed back from the table. “But if Jack double-crosses us, we kill him.”

Merab and Hannah looked down and David’s nervous laughter died in his throat when he saw the ice in her face, the same he’d seen when he first set eyes on her brother, bound for interrogation and execution behind enemy lines. The look that said, _If this is what death looks like when it comes for me, then fuck it, I’m ready._

Merab was the first to break the silence that followed. “Dinner?” she said. “I’ll heat up the grill.”

 

A week later, Merab went to the city for reconnaissance, leaving David, Michelle, and Hannah to restless waiting, and to fill the long, silent afternoon, David plied Michelle with questions about their daughter, her birth, her habits, the things that made her smile.

Elizah had been born in the upstairs bedroom, and hearing this, David had a sudden and horrified vision of the plush white bed upstairs soaked with blood, Michelle’s screams echoing through the house, a choke of gore—

Her laughter, loud and bright, cut into his distress. “Your face,” she said, wheezing, wiping her eyes. “You went to _war_ , David, you stood in front of a tank and _this_ is what puts the fear of God in you?”

David flushed, embarrassed both by Michelle’s laughter and the memory of what really happened in front of the Goliath. Only Eli knew that he had surrendered, and Eli was dead. “I was being sympathetic,” he muttered.

Still giggling, Michelle said, “Merab was here and Hannah is a doula, and it was painful and wonderful and terrible and fine. It’s fine, I’m fine, Elizah is _fine_.” She coughed, out of breath with laughing, and there was a world behind her face that he could not reach. He had seen this before, when he had first fallen in love with her, the princess galaxies out of his league. She told no lies, but simply spoke a language he didn’t understand. She also refused to let him meet Elizah until the conflict was done. 

“I’m back!” Merab’s voice sounded in the hall, she herself appearing moments after. “Rose is sending a car for Michelle tomorrow at 10,” she said, her dark eyes glittering. “Ready to move?”

 

They finalised their plan at the kitchen table, the season’s last mosquitoes buzzing at the window screens. Michelle would return to Shiloh, leaving exile behind her, then lay low, but for coordinating with select Coalition agents, while David sprung Jack and Lucinda, the latter going back to the Wolfsons, the former going with David.

“But he’s not involved,” said Michelle. “You understand? He’s not involved until _I_ clear him. And what’s about Boyden and Klotz? You can trust them?”

David bit his lip. “They helped me—”

“Helped you rescue Silas,” said Michelle, still resistant.

“They helped _me_ , not for Silas’s sake.” David was certain the guards would be allies. “They have access and power, but they’re mostly ignored. Show them the respect they deserve and they’ll be eating out of your hand.”

Giving a small laugh, Michelle buttered a slice of toast, then drizzled it with honey. “That sounds surprisingly manipulative out of your mouth.”

He blushed. “That’s not what I meant—I—”

She silenced him with a wave. “Oh, David,” she said, “you haven’t changed at all.”

For a moment, he didn’t reply. Before appearing at her door, he hadn’t seen Michelle since that night in Samuels’s church, before the Reverend’s murder—They’d promised to marry and then that too fell apart.He felt he hadn’t really known her, nor how much he’d screwed up, until he lost her, until they could communicate only through Merab and the classifieds. They were not in love anymore, but she had—against the odds—become one his dearest friends. “I don’t mean we should manipulate them,” he said, thinking of his family, Eli’s selflessness and courage, Ethan’s passion and violence. “I just mean they’re good men, and they’ll do good, if you honour them for it.” His words stuck in his throat, a reminder of things neither of them should have done: She had abandoned him in court, he had refused her when he thought himself facing execution, and still they’d thought one handfast promise could fix it.

“We shouldn’t have to honour them,” said Hannah. “Goodness is is own reward.”

A door seemed to slam behind Michelle’s eyes—Or had he imagined it? “People don’t do good, David,” she said. “People do what they want.”

He knew she was scared. So was he.

 

Silas and Rose reintroduced Michelle with only moderate pomp—a full-family press conference and the promise of parties to come for First Night—and while the family retreated, taking their legion of media vultures and lookyloos with them, David approached the side-gate. He knocked twice on the glass of the guard-booth window and said, “Mind if I come in, guys?”

Boyden fell off his chair, and when he stood—fidgeting with his cuffs, his hat askew—Klotz said nothing, looking desperately from his partner to David. Back and forth, back and forth, not moving himself, but waiting for Boyden to make a decision.  

David stood loose and relaxed, careful to show his empty hands. “I’ve come to you straight,” he said, “because I trust you and I know you want what’s best for Shiloh. You were always kind to me.”

“You were always good to us, too, sir—David.” Boyden looked over his shoulder, then past David. “But, sir—”

“We’re fine,” said David. “You know as well as I do that we’re standing in a camera dead-spot right now, and we’ve got ten more minutes before the rooftop guard circles past. And you haven’t shot me yet, or called for backup, so I don’t think you will.”

Boyden tugged his cuffs down a final time, then straightened. Licked his lips nervously, then said, “I don’t want to arrest you, but you—You _can’t_ be here.”

“I’m won’t be long, not if I can help it.” David wondered how far his charisma could take him—He had never been conscious of _using_ it, had only done his best to be kind, never managing his image as well as Jack had done, clumsy and country by comparison, but he hadn’t gone a year underground in Gath without picking up a trick or two. “You’re going to let me in,” he said, more firmly than he felt. “And in thirty minutes, right when we’re back at this point in the patrol cycle, I’ll be back here with the Prince and we’re going to walk out of here.”

Boyden and Klotz stared, both open-mouthed.

David trusted them, but his palms had begun to sweat; his eyes locked on Klotz’s hand, hovering over his sidearm, and Boyden’s shift to fighting stance.  “Guys,” he said, “I am on no one’s side but God’s—What about you?”

Boyden remained tense. “The Prince isn’t well, he—”

“What’s wrong with him?” David’s tone was sharper than he’d intended.

“I—” Boyden floundered, Klotz making no move to save him. “The official line is that the family is resolving its personal issues before the Prince returns to public life.” He refused to meet David’s eyes; if not for his sidearm, David could overtake him. Probably could regardless, but still, he waited.

“You believe that?” David’s mind flickered through a film-reel of horrific possibilities. What did it take to tamp a person like Jack down? And what about Lucinda? He hardly wanted to know. “Have you seen hi—them? Ja—The Prince and Ms. Wolfson?”

“Didn’t you see the big press conference today?” Boyden tapped his foot. “It was _weird_. Weirder than usual, I mean, they’re always skittish, but they’ve been getting jumpier, paler—And Thomasina took them away so quickly.”

Klotz broke in, wringing his cap in his hands. “But Thomasina wouldn’t hurt—” 

Whip-quick, Boyden fixed Klotz with such a fierce and disgusted glare—so clearly saying, _Shut up!_ —that David was taken aback, mind whirring as he tried to process the sight. He had come to the gate full of faith—not to mention eager to prove his judgement to Michelle and Merab—but now doubt loomed. Klotz blushed furiously.

Thomasina was clearly a weak point, so David played his last card. “Thomasina’s first and only priority is the King,” he said. “Nothing else in this world will ever surpass that.” Klotz protested, but was silenced by Boyden’s elbow into his ribs. “But _my_ priority is Shiloh,” said David. “ _My_ priority is Gilboa. What’s yours?” He checked his watch; he had played his ace, counting on the goodness of their spirits, and had only three minutes left to convince them, the window left for Jack and Lucinda’s rescue already perilously narrow. 

“ThePrinceisintheSilverWing,” said Boyden, breathlessly. Then, “Shut up, Klotz.” He was deathly pale. “If you go by the kitchens, it’ll take about seven or eight minutes and you shouldn’t run into anyone. They’ve only got one guard and he’s new.”


	2. Benjamin

_“Shall Jonathan die, who hath wrought this great salvation in Israel?” (1 Samuel 14:45)_

 

Jack stumbled into the room with Lucinda close behind him, and the two fell into the corner sofa near the sliding door that overlooked, through bars, the palace’s back-gardens. They had spent twelve months there and knew every inch far too intimately. 

“We can’t go on like this,” he said.

 

***

 

_September (12 months earlier)_

They had determined their own small ways to try to make their imprisonment bearable: He never sat in her spot on the sofa and gave her an hour’s privacy each morning and evening, lingering in the shower or on the balcony so that she might do yoga unwatched. In her turn, she had one evening bent to bring her face so close to his that her hair brushed his cheek and whispered, before taking her headphones into the bathroom and locking the door, “I’m not feeling well, I’m going to take a shower, maybe a bath, I’ll probably be a _couple of hours_.” She had looked from him to the door, outside which stood Stephen, their guard, and shrugged.

And when Stephen came in, before Jack could say a word, he said, “Lie down and don’t move until I come back.” He returned fifteen minutes later, announced that he had looped the camera feed, and they spent, then, that _couple of hours_ shoved into the corner, against the wall and out of sight of the windows, kissing. He hadn’t been alone with Stephen since Lucinda had walked in on them—only talking but too close to brush off—months before, and he hadn’t realised how hungry he was for touch. A distant part of his brain wondered if about Lucinda’s feelings, but he ignored it, focusing instead on the feel of Stephen’s skin against his, the other man’s quickened breaths and eager hands. 

Stephen brushed Jack’s hair back and said, “There’s nothing I can do to help you.”

Jack said, “I don’t expect anything from you,” and kissed his mouth. 

When Lucinda came out of the bathroom, pink-cheeked, her hair towel-wrapped, Stephen had gone for the night. She sat at her end of the sofa and put her bare feet up into Jack’s lap, and he said, “I don’t deserve you.”

“Hell no, you don’t,” she said, and they both laughed. Then she said, “Jack—“ and he knew in his bones that it was the beginning of a terrible conversation, one too serious and painful, nothing he wanted, especially not then, when he still clung to the pleasantly foggy euphoria Stephen had left him in. 

“Lu,” he said, “don’t.”

“I will if I want,” she said, her tone playful but knife-sharp. She unwrapped her towel, then shook out her hair, brushing it back with her fingers. She was offering herself—Not sexually, but investing in his friendship and trust with the only currency she had. _At this moment, now, I feel safe,_ said the toss of her hair, and her feet in his lap said, “ _At this moment, now, I trust you._ ” He knew her well enough, at least, that smart as she was, she was not conniving. She was honest—That was why he’d settled on her after Rose had so ruthlessly and unexpectedly disposed of Katrina Ghent: Lu had been a breath of fresh air, a lightener. He thought now he had underestimated her. 

She said, “Jack, we’re here for the foreseeable, right?”

“Unless you’re feeling frisky and fertile tonight.”

“Then we’re going to need some ground rules,” she said, “and number one, you will never speak that way to me again.”

“Excuse me?”

“Right now,” she said, feet still resting in his lap, “I am your best and only friend, and maybe you’re keen to irritate your father like a pair of sandpaper bluejeans until he gives up and shoots you, but I’d rather live, Jack, and I’d rather you live, too, so that begs the question: What are we going to do?” He laughed, awkwardly and too loudly, and clapped his hand on her ankle. Gave her foot a congenial shake, but she only said flatly, “You fucked me over. I loved you and you fucked me over—You owe me.”

He looked at her, weighing seriousness and flippancy for only a moment before choosing the latter. “Haven’t you got some moxie, dear girl? What do you propose, then?” Beneath his bluster, he felt hope sparkle in his chest, but quickly tamped it down. 

She said, “My family’s going to get m—us out of here. All we have to do is stay alive and sane until then.”

 

_October and November_

They settled their ground-rules slowly—With nothing to do and nowhere to go, they saw no need to hurry, and Jack several times even caught himself enjoying Lu’s company. Enjoying, too, the fantasy that they had any modicum of control over their lives. 

Non-negotiable to Lu—and it wasn’t like he disagreed—was that they would not have sex nor even share a bed, alternating who slept on the couch from week to week.

“And be careful with Stephen,” she said, pointedly.

“Is there someone _you_ want?” He shrugged, hesitant, looking at the floor. “Someone whose—child you _would_ want?” 

“I’m not having any child to be turned over to your parents, no fucking way.”

Private possessions, too, were off-limits, not to be touched nor even discussed without permission, from Lu’s woollen socks—knit by her grandmother for her birthday, though delivered six weeks late, the parcel clearly rifled by security—to the stamp-sized photograph of Joseph, laminated, that Jack had always kept in his pocket, like a token or icon. He saw in the twitch of Lu’s mouth how much she wanted to ask, but he wasn’t ready; he had never shared Joseph with anyone and he wasn’t about to start. 

The day after Hallowe’en, Jack heard her crying in the bathroom, even over the shower, and not knowing what to do, did nothing. A week later, out of the blue, she explained that it had been her mother’s 65 th birthday. Though her family could write to her and the letters were sometimes delivered, she was not permitted to communicate with them. “We’ve got to stick together, you and me,” she said, a letter in her lap with lines blacked-out as by a wartime censor. “And we’ll get out.”

He didn’t believe her, but he owed her— _Something_. A debt he hadn’t yet figured out how to pay. 

 

_December to February_

They were on the wrong side of a one-way mirror. The world peered in on them, but they could not see out. Eventually, Thomasina permitted them newspapers and a pair of e-readers, though barred from most websites, they relied on old, out-of-print material. Stephen was too cautious to push boundaries and Jack didn’t want to drive him away, so Lu read _Daniel Deronda_ , then the rest of Eliot, while on her recommendation, he read _The Portrait of Dorian Gray_.

“Ha fucking ha,” he said bitterly, when he’d done. “Hilarious, Lu, really fucking funny.”

“I wasn’t making fun of you,” she said, brow knit with concern. “I just knew you would like it—You did, didn’t you?” 

He had to admit that he had. 

And he read Marx and Mill and Martineau, at first because they reminded him of Joseph and the time they’d spent studying them together when Joseph was finishing his degree, and then because he enjoyed them. They read often, Lucinda did her yoga and Jack the calisthenic drills of military school out on the balcony, even in winter, hungry for fresh air. They spoke to no one except the guards and to Thomasina—and each other—and could not leave their room but for supervised public appearances. 

In February, exhausted by a heated press conference, he leaned against the wall while Lu curled into the sofa. 

“It was too loud out there,” she whispered. 

He felt the same, but didn’t want to admit that he—who used to live in bone-rattling clubs and on the battlefield—could barely handle the flash and chatter of a simple meet-and-greet. “This is fucking us up,” he said. He thought perhaps she wanted to be held, to be comforted, but he couldn’t tell for certain, nor could he bring himself to move.

 

_March_

Lucinda wore a large woollen sweater and sat wrapped in blankets on the bed, fighting a head-cold, chilled, congested, and ill-tempered. She was also frightened, but would not admit it and Jack didn’t know how to ask her. Earlier, he had again heard her crying in the bathroom, while he again sat on the sofa, powerless. It was her sister Dinah’s birthday.

Lucinda’s closeness to her family bewildered him. His relationships with his own were blotted by toxic intimacy, grounded in the promise of mutually assured destruction, while she loved and missed her parents and siblings, insisting still that they would come for her. 

He had feigned sleep when she opened the door, hearing her shuffle across the room and into bed, the duvet rustling as she settled, and he tried to remember when Michelle had been his closest friend. When that had ended. It wasn’t only that she’d gotten sick—he could blame himself for not knowing how to speak to her when they were bracing themselves to lose her, _her_ , his best friend, his confidante, his twin—but also that when she’d miraculously recovered, she’d become a sombre and moralising stranger, and their parents fell between them like a wall. Silas on her side, Rose on his. And then Shepherd had waltzed into every Gilboan heart with his easy affability, a cornpone sweetness so tangible it had to be an act. It couldn’t have been real. No one was like that. No one was so kind, so genuine; it was impossible

Lu said, “I know you’re not sleeping.” Her voice was congested. “You don’t have to pretend, if you were doing it for me.”

“I heard you crying,” he said suddenly. He hadn’t meant to—Had in fact meant to think of it as little as possible, pretend it had never happened. Pretending was easy—especially for him, after all these years—and her feelings far too complex to contend with, but his words moved faster than his brain and there it was: _I heard you crying_. 

She looked up at him, her nose red and chafed, her arms crossed against her chest, shivering despite her layers, and he saw how much, just how much, he had disappointed her. She had accepted him when he had money and position, when the world shaped itself around the snap of his fingers, and now she was stuck with him, powerless and caged. He had nothing to offer. Though he had, as soon as their imprisonment began and regularly thereafter, searched their room thoroughly, clearing it of bugs, the mute CCTV cameras still ran, their silent witness. “You saw the game before I did,” he said. “They’re trying to break us, Lu, but we’re not going to let them.” Suddenly impulsive, he crossed the room and climbed onto the bed.

“Don’t,” she said.

He froze, reddening again, embarrassed and regretful.

“It’s just I’ve got a cold,” she said, snuffling, holding out her arms to ward him off, “I’ll make you sick.”

Still crouching at the end of the bed, he said, “Is that all? What if I don’t care?” He tilted his head. Watched her swallow.

“I could use a hug,” she said, “if we’re being honest.”

He crawled to the top of the bed, flipped one of the pillows flat against the headboard, and leaned back, putting his arms about her. She leaned into him, tense for a moment, questioning—They’d barely touched at all since Thomasina had first pushed her into the room and locked the door. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this shit,” he said.

She brushed her hair behind her ears; it ticked his nose, smelling lightly of dust and something floral. “I wanted power,” she said. “I knew there would be risks.”

“You didn’t know enough,” he said, arms still wrapped about her, “and you didn’t want power, you wanted me.”

“God, you’re vain,” she said, with a laugh that turned into a cough. “And maybe I wanted it all, but I’m a bad gambler—I stick with the first horse I bet on, all the way.” She put her hands over his. Patted his arm. “I miss my family, especially on days like this, but I’m not going to leave you.”

He huffed ruefully. “It’s not like you have a choice.”

She laughed again, that same rumble sounding in her chest. “Don’t ruin the moment.”

He gave Lu what he hoped was an affectionate half-squeeze—he was not used to casual intimacy—and said, “I’m sorry. Two apologies in one night, by the way, is a record for me, so I hope you feel special.”

“Oh, very.”

They sat quietly a few minutes, Jack not wanting to move and pleased—he couldn’t believe it, pleased—that Lu felt the same. She was the first to break the silence, saying hesitantly, “There’s something I don’t think you’ve realised.”

“What?”

“Shiloh still loves you, Jack.”

That he _hadn’t_ expected. Nor did he believe it and said, scoffing, “They love reading about me—That’s not the same thing.”

She patted his wrist again. “You think I’m joking, but I’m not. Did you know the boys at my little brother’s school all cut their hair just like yours?”

“My hair’s pretty ordinary, Lu.” 

“My point is,” she said, twisting to face him, “is that they associate it with _you_.”

“Recent events suggest that despite my influence on teenage fashion, Silas is still somewhat entrenched.” 

“I’m sick,” said Lu. “Humour me and stop being sarcastic for five minutes.” She sniffed again. “These press conferences and parties—The King’s not using you to gain public support: The public demands you. He doesn’t want you to know, I’d guess, but he actually can’t hurt you, no matter how he might want to. There were people that would have followed you for the sake of Gilboa, or for peace, or for the Benjamin family _sans_ Silas, or for your own sake, but for all those disparate aspirations, they rallied behind _you_. You had so much on your mind during the—back then—but I was reading the papers, watching everyone scurry like rats in a maze. They were _scared_ and he needs to woo them back.”

Jack narrowed his eyes, thinking about what she’d said.

“He’s not _playing_ them,” said Lu. “He’s _ceding_ to them.”

He wondered if it were possible, if he could really be worth more to his country than a gossip headline—He hardly dared dream. 

“During the coup,” said Lu, yawning, “I thought I was going to die every time I turned a corner, every time someone looked at me, and I couldn’t reach my family, and no one here gave one single fuck, least of all you.”

He winced, embarrassed. 

“But I trust you, _now_ , Jack,” she said, “because we’re in this together and we’re not going to get out any other way.”

When she fell asleep a few minutes later, Jack let her rest a few minutes more, then slipped from the bed, lowering her to the pillow Gently, then drawing the duvet past her shoulders. Heavy-eyed himself, he curled up on the sofa, still in his day-clothes, tie loosened and shirt creased, and fell asleep thinking—to his surprise—about Shepherd. The soldier who’d crossed enemy lines not for his prince or his king, not to be a hero, but only to save a fellow soldier.

Waking in the morning, he saw Lu still asleep, but noticed, too, that the spare blanket from the end of the bed had been laid over him in the night.

He had to find a way to help her. 

 

_April to June_

And so they went on, Lucinda growing listless and restless but determined not to show it, and they read and talked and sometimes even lured the reticent Stephen into conversation. 

Then, in late June, Rose visited them, ordering Stephen to take Lu outside. 

“Anything you want to say to me, you can say in front of her.” He drawled, knowing he could not let his family see how much he had come to care for her. Whatever the public or his family thought of him—whether “the party prince” or a scumbag mistreating his beard—was worth it to keep Lu safe. “She’s my lady-love, Mother, be nice to her.”

But Rose only narrowed her eyes and said, “Stephen, out.” Lu mouthed, _Be careful_ , her eyes dark with worry as Stephen pulled her into the hall, and when they were alone, Rose said, “Jack, please, you have to give me something to work with.”

He rolled his eyes and she snapped—Snatched the first thing within reach, a glass of water on the coffee table between them, and hurled it against the wall. A smash of glass and a splash, the drip of water against the carpet.

Despite trying to show no reaction, he had flinched, and worried what signals might already have betrayed his fear: Some twitch or tic, something in his eyes. Was he really so good at keeping secrets? All his life he’d thought he held secrets all his own, private things—his sexuality, Joseph, the books he’d read as a kid, burner cellphones, the lost dream of studying (of all things!) chemistry—but his parents always knew. Always two moves ahead, always playing him. “Punish me if you want, I deserve it,” he said, gambling, “but Lucinda’s a child in this. Send her back to her mother, why don’t you?” He didn’t want to lose her, to be left alone, but he couldn’t keep her in a place that was slowly killing her.

“Your father wants an heir,” said Rose, struggling for evenness in her tone.

“He’s got quite a selection already.” Jack shrugged. “Set Michelle up with someone nice—It’s only a family secret she can’t get knocked up, so you can rustle some spare brat up, I’m sure.”

Rose blanched, then reddened just as quickly.

_Clearly a sore spot_ , he thought. “And what about you? You’re not so old, are you? Couldn’t take one more for the team?”

“How dare—”

“And let’s not forget,” said Jack, pushing dangerously on, heart pounding, high on risk for the first time in months, “a certain half-brother.” He felt no animosity toward the boy, Seth, who couldn’t be blamed for the game his parents played, but the game itself knew few loyalties

“That _boy_ and his _mother_ ,” said Rose, through her teeth, “are not getting anywhere near my family’s inheritance.”

That was when he knew he’d lost her—That he’d never even had her. When it came to suppressing either Joseph’s video _or_ David’s photographs, to protecting either Jack _or_ Michelle, Rose had chosen him, and even when he hated her, he had loved that. He hadn’t realised until that moment, her sitting white-knuckled and furious while water pooled at the baseboards in a heap of smashed glass, how much he had depended on being her favourite. ( _You love your mother_ , Joseph had said more than once, ignoring Jack’s protestations. _I can tell._ ) 

But it wasn’t favouritism, and she hadn’t come to him that day out of any maternal feeling: She didn’t love him any more than Michelle, though she chose him time and again, but only saw him as the greater liability to the family. Silas hated him for his sexuality and for his role in the failed coup, and wanted both to hurt and humiliate him, but Rose was big-picture and saw the looming collapse of her own small empire, either to David, or worse, to Jack’s not-so-secret half-brother. She was the dangerous one. 

“I’m not touching Lucinda,” he said, taking a stand. “My choice. I refuse.” Rose looked about to slap him, just as she had the last time they’d talked this way, the last time his _inclinations_ had threatened the family. Hilarious that of all he had done, it was his banging men that really ground her gears, and he could not suppress a smirk. 

“Your father wanted to have you killed,” she said. “A public execution. You’re here, now, because—and only because—I stayed his hand, so don’t think I can’t push him in the other direction just as easily.” She rubbed her eyes, her hand shaking; he felt no sympathy. “There are things you have to do, Jonathan,” she said, “to make it through this world, sacrifices you have to make—It’s not like it would be difficult, that ridiculous girl thinks the sun rises and sets on you.”

“I will not fuck—”

“Don’t be vulgar.”

“That’s rich, coming from you, and I will not _fuck_ ,” he said, accentuating his words, “on command. Full stop.”

Rose stood, then, brusquely smoothing the front of her skirt. “I will have her shackled to a bed,” she said, “and operated on. You’d better decide which option you’d prefer.” 

She was at the door before Jack spoke out. “Take out the cameras.”

She turned, eyes narrowed with suspicion. 

“You want something, I want something—Take out the cameras, every one in this room. I’m not stupid, I know they’re here. Take them out.” He only wanted to buy time.

She left without saying another word, Lu returning a moment later, pale and shaken. 

Jack watched her bare feet pad into the room. She knelt at the wall and began to pick up the larger pieces of glass, saying nothing.

“Just leave it,” he said.

“Somebody has to—” She gasped, and when he looked up, her index finger was bright with blood.

“I told you to leave it.”

“Don’t snap at me.”

He inhaled sharply, trying to steady himself. Snorted with frustration. He wanted to follow her into the bathroom, but knew he needed to let her have her space, instead pacing the room with his hands behind his back. When at last, Lu emerged, hand bandaged, he said, “How much did you hear?” Then, before she could answer, he said, “I don’t think you’re ridiculous.” Then, again before she could respond, he said, “Did you really think so much of me, before?”

She met his eyes and said, I heard most of it, and Jack, you’re beautiful and a prince and so charismatic, you could have had anyone and you were looking at me, and think about everything I could have done as your wife—Why wouldn’t I love you?” She shrugged. “If the world was just a little bit different, I could have _made_ you. I was _perfect_ for you.”

He wanted to say, _I won’t let them hurt you_ , but he didn’t know how that could be true. 

 

Later that week, Thomasina came to supervise the cameras’ removal, eying Jack suspiciously as the workman fussed with the wires. “Your mother asked me to tell you,” she said, “that she expects you to know what _this_ means.”

A chill crept across his skin.

 

_July_

Jack sat with Stephen on the floor in their corner, Stephen with his back against the wall and Jack pulling himself into his lap, kissing his neck and running a hand through his hair.

“But how are you, Jack?” 

“Right now,” said Jack, leaving another kiss against Stephen’s ear, “just fine.” Stephen leaned into his touch and Jack thought he had managed to shut him up—But no such luck.

“I just—You shouldn’t be trapped here.”

“You’re not wrong.” Jack reached up to stroke Stephen’s cheek, then tilted the other man’s face toward his own. Kissed him, then said sarcastically, “When did you stumble across the startling revelation?” He knew he had no future with Stephen—had found him in the first place while stumbling through a daze of grief after Joseph died—and he believed, most of the time at least, that Stephen knew it, too. He wanted only the mindless comfort of it, no feelings hurt, no questions of commitment or courage, just someone hungry for the feel of his lips against their skin. And if he thought of Shepherd, he did not often admit it to himself. “You should—” He was temporarily silenced by Stephen’s slowly working a hand up his thigh, then managed to blurt, “You should be more worried about yourself than me.”

“I’ve been careful,” said Stephen. “Always have.”

“You could do something for me,” said Jack, pulling back slightly, looking Stephen in the eye. “Well, not for me—For Lucinda.” Rose’s threat had heightened his sense of urgency; he needed to get Lucinda out of the palace, but he couldn’t do it alone. He knew that anyone who came into contact with them, including Stephen, would be watched—standard practice—but while he could advise Stephen on dodging little things, beating bugs, surveillance tactics, looped CCTV footage for covert necking—anything bigger was too risky. They—he—needed help. He took a breath. “I need you to contact my sister.” Nearly a year had passed, and the Wolfsons showed no sign of coming as Lu so ardently believed they would; he didn’t think Michelle would help him, he had blown that, but she might help Lu.

But Stephen blanched—the man was so scared—and Jack’s heart sunk; there was a time when he could twist the straightest arrow around his little finger, but that time, it seemed, had gone. 

“I can’t,” said Stephen. “I _can’t_ , If I get caught—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” said Jack, retreating behind feigned indifference. “Whatever. Cut the chatter.” He pressed against Stephen again, cutting off his response with an angry kiss, and then the shower stopped, filling the suite with a sudden silence. Jack pulled back once more. “Lu will be out in a minute,” he said, sliding off Stephen’s lap and rising unsteadily to his feet. “Better get going.”

“I’m sorry,” said Stephen, not looking at him.

Jack wrestled with his frustration, remembering what courage had done to Joseph and trying not to make the same mistakes. He said, “Don’t be.”

Stephen frowned.

“Really,” said Jack. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.” 

“I might leave,” said Stephen, suddenly. “Soon. For Port Prosperity.” He frowned, curving into himself, awaiting Jack’s reaction.

“Do what you want,” said Jack, shrugging, but he missed, he _missed_ , Stephen’s hands when he had gone. 

 

_August_

Stephen wasn’t there for his next shift. Instead, someone neither Jack nor Lu recognised and who didn’t acknowledge either of them but with a deferential nod and a curt “sir” or “ma’am,” appeared outside the door. He did not come inside, and all afternoon and into the evening Jack paced the suite, growing more and more agitated. He refused to consciously entertain the prospect that something had happened to Stephen—that, like Joseph, he had outed them both and damn the consequences, or if something else, some lack of caution, some eager and malicious pair of eyes, had found and betrayed them—but the fear still haunted the edges of his thoughts. _What if_ , he thought, _Stephen was playing_ me _all along?_

“He did _say_ he might,” said Lucinda. “He may have just moved on. We don’t know what’s happened— _If_ anything’s happened.”

“Exactly,” said Jack, snappish. “We _don’t_ —We know fucking _nothing_ , Lu, and if something has happened to him—” This was as far as he could go, unable to bear the thought of more blood on his hands. 

When their silent guard brought their dinner, Jack could bear it no longer, saying as nonchalantly as he could, “And how long will we have the pleasure of _your_ company?”

“Sir?”

“You a temp or what?” Jack licked his lips. “I’m a creature of habit,” he said. “I don’t like change.”

“Stephen asked for a quick transfer to Port Prosperity,” said the guard. “Told me his mom was ill so he wanted to work closer to her.”

“You’re sure?” Here, Lucinda broke in. “You’re sure nothing’s happened to him?”

The guard looked at her, then at Jack as if they had two heads apiece. “He seemed fine when he texted me this morning,” he said, slowly, confused. “Sir, I can’t speak to you and I’m going to need you to step back.”

Jack was hit first by a wave of relief, then a clutch of pain. Stephen was alive, thank God, and free of Shiloh, even better, but Jack could not forget that he had driven him away. He didn’t know what to do with the wretched tangle of emotions knotting in his chest—betrayal, pride, respect, resentment—and it was all he could do to keep from snapping at Lu, no matter how she didn’t deserve it. And a devil whispered in his ear, _They could be lying, he could be dead, you will_ never _outsmart your father._

“He’s alright,” said Lu when they were once again alone. “He’s just left, like he said he would.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were heartbroken.”

“I asked his help,” said Jack. “To get you out. That’s why he left, I was scaring him.” _Shit, he was going to cry._ “I’m sorry, Lu,” he said. “I tried.”

 

_Present_

Jack stumbled into the room with Lucinda close behind him, and the two fell into the corner sofa near the sliding door that overlooked, through bars, the palace’s back-gardens. They had spent twelve months there and knew every inch of the room far too intimately. 

“We can’t go on like this,” he said

 

Their latest supervised outing, a press conference, had come with Michelle’s triumphal return—Michelle, who hadn’t tried to contact him, not once, nor even to speak to him when she returned. His father had posed with him for a photograph, one cold hand on the small of his back as though they had never fought— _as if I had never taken bullets for him_ , Jack thought bitterly—and Silas had leaned close as if reconciliation were possible and said, “You are a hair’s breadth from an unfortunate accident, boy—You dare, you _dare_ to fuck a man—”

Jack’s heart nearly stopped, _Stephen, oh God, Stephen, I’m betrayed,_ but when the blood stopped pounding in his ears, he realised Silas wasn’t talking about Stephen. Was just generally opining. As usual. He tried to steady his pulse.

“You can fuck a man no problem,” said his father, “but can you tap one pretty piece of ass?”

“You don’t want my child,” said Jack, behind a press-ready smile, no longer satisfied by playing nice. “We both know you have a perfect replacement in the wings. ”

Silas’s expression flickered so briefly into dismay that Jack later doubted he had seen it at all. The family walked a gauntlet of shouted interrogation— _Jonathan, have you finalised a date for the wedding? Lucinda, darling, you look phenomenal, how are you staying fit? Lucinda, can you comment on those baby rumours? Jonathan,will you be returning to your ministerial portfolio?_ —and murmuring his assigned lines thoughtlessly, Jack realised that Silas didn’t _want_ Seth to be king. The thought was bleach in his throat and he wasn’t sure which was worse: That Silas thought _him_ an unsuitable heir or that he loved only Seth, not Jack, enough to keep the poison cup of kingship from ever touching his lips.

“Well, if you don’t want the kid on the throne,” he said, nonchalant, not caring anymore, almost wanting his father to snap, “there’s always Shepherd.”

He was certain only the flashing presence of a dozen cameras kept Silas from killing him on the spot. 

 

Back in their room, he had run out of options: Pissed off his mother and his father, irrevocably, and with Stephen gone, blown the last ghost of a chance at helping Lu.

She said, dull as a butter knife, “My family isn’t coming, are they?”

When the door opened, he didn’t look up, knowing their guard—he thought perhaps the man’s name was Aaron?—would say his piece, then go.

The voice he heard, though, was tentative and—Familiar? A hesitant, whispered, “Jack?” A rural accent he could barely place—the memory tickled his mind—but knew instinctively that he dare not recognise.

He looked up, and wearing a guard’s uniform and with a cap pulled low over his hair and a sidearm clipped at his hip, David Shepherd stood in his doorway. 

“Michelle got your message,” he said. “Feel like getting out of here?”

“My message?”

“The postcard,” said David. “It got through.” He grinned, that winning smile Jack loved and loathed. “C’mon—Pack up your troubles.”

Lucinda flashed into action first. Said, “Jack, can we trust him?”

_It had to have been Stephen._ Stephen had done it, gone to bat for them. _Thank you._ “Lu, darling,” he said, voice full of wonder. “Get your coat.”

She sprung forward, kicking off her heels, and he checked his pocket for Joseph’s picture. Feeling the familiar square under his fingers, he said, “I’m ready.”

 

David led them through the Silver Gallery, taking an upper-level corridor that connected their room to the service stairs, and checking his watch, whispered, “Your guard’s on an eleven-and-a-half minute rotation. Right now, he’s about kitty-corner to us, but we need to get there”—he pointed to the service door about twenty feet away, where the corridor turned right—“before he gets in our line of sight.” The three walked quickly, Jack shifting automatically into military mode, his skin humming, heart thudding, eyes wide; he saw the same stiff alertness in Shepherd’s shoulders, every fibre of the man tuned to the danger they were in, but Lucinda stumbled barefoot behind them. Jack had just turned back, slowing his pace and reaching for her hand, saying “C’mon, we’re in this tog—” when something struck him from behind.

Words cut off, he clipped his head against the wall and a vicious sting blurred his vision, a warm wetness, blood. Wiping his eyes, he tried to stand, but couldn’t, his legs wouldn’t respond, someone lay on top of them. “Shepherd?” He coughed. “Lu?” No response, and he wiped his eyes again, _head wounds bleed like nothing else, fuck,_ and someone—not Shepherd but the guard, Aaron, stood over them, gun in hand, shouting, “Do—Not—Move.” Safety click and, _God, this was it, the end—_

Then, a shot, and Jack jerked back, then passed his sleeve across his eyes once more and suddenly, viciously, his mind and vision cleared. Aaron was on the floor, choking, coughing, then still. He’d seen it before, in the war, but still, he couldn’t—He tore his gaze away, Shepherd rolled off his legs and sat up, but when the other man patted his hip, his sidearm was missing, and they both turned. Lu stood over them with her eyes wide and Shepherd’s gun in her shaking hands.

“He tackled you,” she said. “Your gun fell at my feet. He was going to shoot you, both of you.”

“Lucinda,” said Shepherd, “put that down. It’s over.”

“He didn’t see me,” she said. “No one in this place ever _saw_ me.” She turned to Jack. “You should go on without me.” 

“Not happening,” said Shepherd. “We—”

Jack hushed him with a distracted flap of his hand and marshalling his strength, bracing himself against the wall, pulled himself to his feet. “I’m not leaving without you, Lu,” he said. “We’re going together, you always said that.”

“I killed a man,” she said. Her eyes looked past him, past even the body on the floor.”

“We don’t know—”

Shepherd looked up from where he had knelt over the guard. “No,” he said, “he’s dead.”

“Fuck,” said Jack, under his breath. “Lu, we have—”

“I have to stay,” said Lucinda, still holding the gun. “I’ll go to prison.” She laughed, a cold and horrible sound, nothing like the joy Jack had found in her, _he and Lucinda tucked into bed, laughing at themselves_. “Real prison this time.”

“I am not leaving without you,” said Jack, inching toward her, still braced against the wall.

“We need to move,” said Shepherd, his hands bloody. “Now.”

“When all of this is done,” said Jack, creeping forward still, “we’ll pay for everything, reckon every debt, I promise. Justice for this man, Lucinda, and for you.” Closing the last scrap of distance between them, he lunged, snatched the gun from her hand, and passed it back to David. Closed his hands around her wrist and looked her straight in the eye. “When this is over, I swear, but I need you with me now.”

A distant shouting, drawing nearer, sounded at the far end of the corridor.

“Michelle’s going to fucking kill me,” said Shepherd. He flipped off his cap and ran his hand through his—badly dyed, Jack noticed—brown hair. “Can you two walk?”

Jack wasn’t certain he could, but he pulled Lu forward all the same, and the two stumbled bloody and disoriented through the service door with Shepherd close on their heels, the latter pausing only a moment to jam the door behind them. “Some rescue,” he said, their feet pounding the stairs. 

“Ha fucking ha,” said Shepherd, herding them down another corridor, one lined with trash-bags and recycling. “Put these on.” He chucked them two pairs of worn coveralls, then shucked his own outer jacket and pulled on a similar pair. “Wish you weren’t barefoot,” he said to Lu.

Lu was still shaking. Jack helped her into the coveralls, then donned his.

“Hats,” said Shepherd, tossing them each a baseball cap. “Now pick up a bag and follow me, nice and casual.” He led them outside—Jack blinked in the light—and into a rusty van with the Benjamin butterfly logo bright on the side. Boyden, his face pale and his cap askew, sat behind the wheel.

Shepherd shoved Jack and Lu into the back, then pulled himself into the passenger seat. “Where’s Klotz?”

“He’s not coming,” said Boyden, putting the van into gear. “He’s staying here, but he’s on your team, David. He’ll wait for us.”

Then, out the gate and onto freedom. _Freedom_? Dizzy and head ringing with pain, Jack vomited onto the floor. Lu began to cry.


	3. Jeopardy

_“David arose out of a place toward the south, and fell on his face to the ground, and bowed himself three times: and they kissed one another, and wept with one another.” (1 Samuel 20:41)_

 

In the month since they had left the palace, including two interminably long weeks in a safe-house—“Trading one prison for another,” he had said bitterly—Silas’s communications team had mobilised an assortment of lies and old news footage to claim that Jack and Lucinda had been hospitalised for their own protection. Yet even with these, the King had been unable to quash the rumours (most of them true) circling about the escape. 

“That’s exactly what we want,” said Shepherd, when they had left their safe-house at last. “Don’t worry.” Jack had been about to argue, but Lucinda’s parents had appeared, leaving he and Lu tangled in a rushed goodbye. 

“Look at me,” he said, standing in the doorway, trying to reach her before he lost her, maybe for good. “We’re going to fix this, I promise.” 

Lu’s mother took her by the elbow and pulled her away—the Wolfsons hated him, not that he blamed them—but she tugged free and threw her arms around his neck. Embraced him. “You’ve promised,” she said. “Don’t forget and please, be careful.”

Then she was gone, and he and Shepherd were left alone to cross the border into Gath just as they had once before. _Another life, he and Shepherd running through the trees_.

 

Shepherd had told him not to worry, but landed in the Gath capital, dragged from meeting to meeting like a show-dog and confined to a string of dingy flats in the city’s industrial park when they weren’t on the move, Jack had more than enough time alone with his bleak and lonely thoughts.

And the greatest shock? That Michelle had apparently had Shepherd’s child in the year he’d missed. He had to laugh about it, all his lost time. Shielding himself in his old indifference, he pretended not to care that he could no longer follow Merab ( _Merab!_ He hadn’t seen her in years, not since they were all kids) and Shepherd’s political conversations, nor understand the headlines, nor even recognise popular music or films. He pretended, too, that the _permanence_ that Shepherd and Michelle’s child (his _niece_!) represented didn’t sting. That he hadn’t thought about Shepherd, not at all, in the twelve months of their separation. 

A week into their time in Gath, though, a month after their rescue, he reached his limit. “I can’t,” he said, hating to have to say it but not able to bear another day. “I can’t.” Shepherd looked up from the table where he sat doing a crossword. He’d been quiet, clearly doing his level best to give Jack his space, and it was driving Jack mad.

“Can’t what?”

“Be _in_ here.” Jack spoke through clenched teeth. “I spent a year in a room like this and I just—I can’t, okay?”

Shepherd frowned and stood quickly, shoving back his chair. “Of course it’s okay. I thought—I thought you wouldn’t like crowds, or I would have asked sooner, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to pry. ”

Jack had no response to that, but the other man’s eagerness reminded him of their first encounter: Shepherd’s earnest passion, the hands that had twice set Jack free.

“The keys are on the table,” he said, looking down, hands gripping the back of his chair.

“You’re not coming?” The words were out before Jack could stop them.

“Do you—I didn’t think you’d want me to,” said Shepherd, just as Jack said, “I didn’t think you’d let me go alone.”

“You can go if you want. I’m not going to follow you.” Shepherd swallowed, then said, “You’re free, Jack. I can’t make you do anything.”

“Well, I don’t. Know the city,” said Jack, clumsily. “So you might as well come.” 

Shepherd put his shoes on.

 

Dressed casually, pleasantly scruffy, they blended smoothly into the city’s bustle, and Jack was exhausted after just a few hours, the sights and sounds, but exhilarated, too. Wandering a shopping mall in the late afternoon, though, one shop’s television display had broadcasted one of Silas’s latest appearances, and Jack found he couldn’t breathe. He hadn’t had a panic attack since he came back from the front, and his chest felt like it was collapsing, and—

But Shepherd steered him to a quieter aisle. “Count with me,” he said.

Jack was bent double. Hissed, “What?”

“Breathe,” said Shepherd again. “Breathe in and count with me: One, two, three, four.”

Jack gripped his hand tightly and did as directed.

“Now hold for seven.” He rubbed Jack’s shoulder. “Breathe out for eight.”

Jack did not let go until his breathing steadied; Shepherd did not pull away. 

And he caught, too, the Gath news-anchor’s words as he walked away. “Popular support for Prince Jonathan, though his whereabouts are currently unknown, continues to grow, with leading pundits suggesting that King Silas may not only be losing favour, but also control.” A disbelieving smile crept onto his face.

 

Later that week, having collected Merab’s latest communiqué from a train station locker, they walked through a park in the city centre, the autumn chill slightly warmed by the late afternoon sun. Shaded glasses, baseball caps, attempts to be inconspicuous. Jack had his hands in his pockets, then shifted, scratched his forehead, lost in thought. Realising Shepherd had fallen behind, Jack turned to find him kneeling to the ground.

“Drop something?”

Shepherd shook his head. “I think you did?” He jogged up, then held out his hand. Jack’s small photograph of Joseph rested in his palm. 

“That—” _That’s not mine._ The denial lay heavy and bitter on his tongue, ready, waiting, but he couldn’t betray Joseph again. He snatched the picture from Shepherd’s hand, then stuffed it into his pocket. He was angry and reckless, frightened and tired—Tired of waiting for Ruth and tired of hiding.

“You’re welcome,” said Shepherd, pointedly and with a raised eyebrow.

“Go on,” said Jack. “I know you want to, so go on. Ask.”

“Ask?” 

“You really don’t want to know who’s in the picture?” Jack scowled. “I find that hard to believe.” 

Shepherd shrugged, looking away. _Was he blushing?_ “Not if you don’t want to tell me.”

_Fuck it._ “He was my boyfriend,” said Jack. Then bitterly, “He’s dead.”

Shepherd put his hand over his mouth. Said, “Jack.” Rubbed his jaw and said, “What was his name?”

“Joseph,” he said, shocked that he’d sent the name, his solitary prayer, into the world. “Joseph Lasile.”

 

And he found that once he started talking about Joseph, he couldn’t stop; he had never been so open, not even with Lu. Not _since_ Joseph. Yet there he was, walking in the early evening, spilling his guts to David Shepherd. 

“He was an honourable person,” he said, he and Shepherd taking a gravel path toward the river. “One of those people who think that if you just tell the truth, if you say it loudly enough, then everything will come out alright.”

****“Doesn’t sound like the kind of person who would out you to every news agency in Shiloh,” said Shepherd, with an awkward shrug, his hands in the pockets of his zip-up sweater.

“That’s not what he did.” Jack bit his lip, said, “God, I don’t even know what he was thinking. It wasn’t to hurt me and he didn’t want money—You know he just sent the discs, he didn’t sell them? And he didn’t put the video on the Internet. He knew he was putting himself in more danger.” He stomach roiled; he didn’t want to think about these things. He, _he_ , was the one who had put Joseph in the most terrible position, saying with every public outburst and every shadowed kiss, _If I don’t love you I will hurt you and if I love you I will hurt you more_. Joseph had shrunk from him the night of the blackout with real fear in his voice, _I don’t want any trouble_ , but Jack had let himself believe that he wasn’t that kind of person, that Joseph was safe from him, that with Joseph he was real. 

But maybe, instead, that ugly self was real.  Maybe that was who he was. He had wanted to believe that his relationship with Joseph was nothing like Silas’s “Sanctuary” but he had driven his lover into the same life, ignoring every sign. “I knew him since we were teenagers,” he said. They walked onto a flaked-painted metal footbridge and both paused to lean over the railing. “He was a parliamentary intern.” Jack allowed himself a small smile. “Of course.”

“Of course?”

“Oh, right.” Having so intimately protected his memories of Joseph for so long, it was strange to pick through them to describe him for another. He couldn’t shake the fear that his memories could be spent, that if he pulled them from his mind for Shepherd, he might lose them for good. 

 

***

 

_He was seventeen, Joseph a year older and one of a half-dozen parliamentary interns working a prestigious placement. Meeting the Prince had been a perk of the assignment, and for Jack, shy and awkward, Joseph was by far the most interesting and easy to speak with: Excited about his work, passionate and knowledgeable, and polite to everyone but not fawning like the others. As the Prince, Jack had needed to give each one equal attention, but in the absence of school and with his parents preoccupied by Michelle’s medical appointments, he had the summer to himself, and worked up the courage to find Joseph again, before the six-week internship ended. Feeling reckless, he bought a cheap burner flip-phone, and gave Joseph the number. A private number—Thomasina would have been furious, if she’d known._

_< Thank you very much.> read Joseph’s first text. <It was a privilege to work with you. J.> _

_Jack couldn’t help laughing at the other boy’s formality. <no prob> he wrote back. <text if u wanna hang>._

_He hadn’t expected Joseph to take him up on the offer and besides, the boy lived in a tiny town hours from Shiloh by rail, but a few weeks later, at the beginning of September, his phone buzzed. Expecting a reprimand from Thomasina—for what, he didn’t know, the latest thing he’d screwed up—or a directive from Silas, he winced, then realised it was the burner, and tore his room apart searching for it. Once he flipped it open, he found, <In town for uni. What’s the best place in Shiloh for pizza? J.>_

_Joseph started at Shiloh City University that autumn, studying poli-sci, and though Jack had two semesters of secondary left, never made him feel childish or foolish—Or like he was being handled with kid-gloves, the saccharine deference that most strangers gave him. They texted and hung out at Methuselah’s Pizzeria in the downtown, Jack trying not to be noticed and Joseph too eagerly relating what he’d just read or discussed in class to even notice whether they’d been noticed at all. Jack told him things he’d told no one else, about the science that fascinated him—chemistry was his favourite subject—and even about Michelle. He was high on someone caring about what he had to say; he was taking a huge risk, euphoric with the danger, daring Joseph to fuck him over, sell his secrets, pimp their friendship, but he never did._

_One night at Methuselah’s, Joseph said, “You don’t—” He stopped himself, blushing. “You’re sure you don’t—you know,_ mind _me just—talking about this_ _—all the time—_ _uni and stuff. You’re not—bored?”_

_Shocked, Jack shook his head, saying, “No, no, man, Joseph, seriously—No. It’s fine.” He couldn’t believe someone as cool as Joseph wanted to hang out with him, but he didn’t know how to say that without sounding weird._

_Thomasina caught him late one night, sneaking in through the kitchen._

_“I was just out with a friend—With friends, Thomasina,” he said, heart racing. “Don’t tell them, please.”_

_Thomasina frowned._

_“Please, Thomasina. Please? Promise you won’t tell them?”_

_“Alright,” she said. “I promise—But be careful.”_

_He didn’t know then that he was already betrayed._

 

_Just after New Year’s, Jack got drunk for the first time, hiding in a broom cupboard in the Bronze Gallery, weeping and clutching a bottle of red wine; it was only drink he had found unprotected in the kitchen, though he thought it disgusting. Michelle had been diagnosed terminal earlier that day. It was the middle of the night and Joseph had gone home two weeks before to visit his parents, but Jack dialled his number and the other boy held the line for hours._

_“Keep talking,” he said. “Just keep talking, I don’t mind. Tell me anything you want.”_

_Jack woke up the next morning, still in the gallery, his head splitting and his phone still in his hand. He had one text: <If you’re reading this, go back to sleep. :) J.>_

 

_Jack started at Eastbourne Military Academy that autumn. He’d been so proud to report his acceptance to Silas—Eastbourne accepted a scant_ eight _per cent of applicants—but his father had only said, “It’s not like they’d slight you—Now_ that’s _power!” Joseph, though, gave him a pair of camouflage socks and a bottle of wine, being intent on teaching Jack to like it._

_“Yeah, I_ know _you could, I dunno, steal some or get it from your kitchens or whatever,” he said, “but this is special.” It was from a vineyard outside his hometown and they drank it together the night before Jack left._

_No Eastbourne cadet was allowed outside contact for the first six months—no texts, no emails, no Facebook, no calls, no post—and it was the first time since Joseph had started university that Jack hadn’t been in regular contact with him. He was determined, though, to succeed at Eastbourne, to prove that he hadn’t only ridden the Benjamin name into one of the few, coveted spots. Secretly, under the guise of keeping a journal, he wrote Joseph. Sometimes a full letter, though more often than not, a scrap of a note, but every day. He didn’t write Michelle, even knowing he was being childish; he was waiting for_ her _to reach out first, that was all. His parents, for their part, expected silence._

_Home on leave at the end of the exclusion period, he met Joseph at Methuselah’s with his journal shoved into the back pocket of his jeans. He didn’t know what he intended to_ do _with it, certainly not show it to Joseph—Or anyone. Ever. Just keep it with him so no one else could get their hands on it. What could he have said—“Joseph, I think that maybe I love you, but it’s probably just a fucked-up fantasy carryover from military school, you know, lots of dudes around, so just ignore me.” He had kissed boys in school when he was a kid, whatever, but this—But he saw Joseph, the way his eyes lit up when Jack made his way toward their back-corner table, and he knew what he felt wasn’t fantastical. But he didn’t know what to do what to do about it. Would he risk losing him if he dared make a move? And if he did, what move? And how in_ fuck _would he keep it from Silas?_

_Despite his anticipation, their dinner was short and awkward, punctuated with silences that had never plagued them before, until Jack just wanted to go home. It was only 9:30 when they paid their bills and parted ways, Jack unsatisfied and angry with himself for fucking it up. Joseph had probably seen the strangeness in him and been put off._

_Then, as he stood on the corner waiting for a break in traffic, Joseph caught up with him. Stood before him clutching the strap of his satchel with both hands and shifting awkwardly from foot to foot. Jack’s heart pounded._

_“Okay, look,” said Joseph, after a painful silence. He was breathing heavily, having run up the street, and pulled a fat file-folder from his satchel. “Look,” he said again, “you probably don’t want to read these, but I wrote to you while you were away, and—” He stopped. Said, “Never mind, it’s dumb, forget I said anything,” and tried to stuff the papers back into his bag, but Jack caught his hand and all he could think above the echo of his pulse in his ears was,_ His hand, I’m holding his hand, his hand. 

_He said, “It’s okay,” and he wanted to match Joseph’s courage, but he couldn’t get the words out. “I—” He swallowed, then said, quickly, “I did the same thing,” and yanked the folder from Joseph’s hand, then replaced it with his journal. Every note he’d written for the past six months. He was giving his heart away._

_Joseph bundled him into a tight embrace, crushing the journals and papers between them, Jack said into his shoulder, “I missed you so much,” and Joseph kissed him. Bliss_.

 

***

 

Jack picked at the peeling paint on the bridge-rail. “It’s just—With the intern thing—If you knew him, it would be so obvious. He was going to do such big things and never by relying on me. I’d try to help, give him a leg up, and he’d always find some way to slip out of it, smiling. He was going to earn everything he got. It was very endearing.”

“Maybe that’s what he was doing,” said Shepherd. “With the tape. Trying to earn you.”

Jack flicked another scrap of paint into the river. “I boxed him into a corner. He was only trying to get out of the cage I’d put him in.”

Shepherd had bent to pick up stray twigs from the bridge deck and now twisted them in his hands. He snapped one into two pieces and stripped it of its leaves.

Jack scrubbed his face with his hands, the old sickness creeping into his belly. “Everything I did was to keep us safe, all the things I did and made him do, all the secrets. The girls—” His voice broke, but he didn’t care. “I didn’t want to—Joseph knew, we talked about it and he understood, but he hated it and I didn’t want to. I just had to keep Silas off my back. Then, in the end, it didn’t even matter.” He snorted. “Silas knew the whole time.” It had been Thomasina who had outed him, though it had taken Jack an embarrassingly long time to realise. His younger self had been far too trusting. 

“It wasn’t for nothing,” said Shepherd quietly.

Jack snorted again, disgusted by the platitude. He knew what he had done, the pain he’d caused Joseph, and for what? Lies and a game for his father to play. “Yeah, right.”

“You did the best you could with what you had.”

“I could’ve done better.”

“Congratulations,” said Shepherd. “You’re human.” He handed Jack one of the twigs. “Now on the count of three, drop it in the river.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

“ _Why?_ ”

“First one through to the other side wins.”

Jack’s mouth dropped open. “What are you, _five_? Is this what you do for fun back on the farm? _God_ , if you think—”

“Scared you’ll lose?” Shepherd grinned and punched him lightly on the shoulder, then held his hand out over the bridge’s edge. “One—Get ready, come on.”

Jack sighed, refusing to smile, trying—and failing—to resist the brightness that surrounded Shepherd, even in all his naïveté. He reached over the side.

“One, two, three!”

They dropped the sticks into the river and Shepherd pulled him to the other side of the bridge, humming with concentration. “This is a problem,” he said. “I can’t tell which one is mine and which one is yours.”

“Mine’s the one that won.”

Shepherd laughed, and they stood against the railing, the air chilling around them now the sun had gone. “I never told my dad,” he said. He rubbed his jaw. 

“What?”

“About me—That I went for guys as well as girls.” He sucked his lip and looked at Jack, daring him to respond. 

Jack tilted his head in confusion, hardly believing what he was hearing. _Shepherd?_ David _Shepherd? Into guys?_

“Sometimes I think he must have known,” said Shepherd, “but other times, I just—Doubt. Anyway, I never told him, so I don’t know what he would have said. My mom had a hard time with it, especially when I tried to bring a boyfriend home. My brothers, too, though not Eli.” He smiled and his eyes were lost in the memory. “Eli was good.”

_Eli_. It took Jack a moment to place the name, remembering the second of David’s family to die in Silas’s war with Gath. “Joseph, too,” he said. 

“We should get going,” said Shepherd. “You alright?”

Shepherd’s friendly ear had helped more than he’d expected. “I’m fine,” he said, brusquely. Then, more gently, still startled by what Shepherd had revealed, he said, “Thanks.”

 

***

 

_During the blackout, Joseph had fallen asleep with his head against Jack’s chest, while Jack sat up through the dark night, buzzing with love and fear and gratitude—so immensely grateful, unbearably, unbelievably, that Joseph hadn’t pushed him away. Had instead kissed him, given him his hand, and led him back to his small flat. It was the only place Jack felt entirely safe with the windows open and there, Joseph had kissed him some more, had undressed him, had murmured loving nothings against his skin as though the last time they had met Jack had_ not _flinched from him, sneered at him, struck him across the face. He had run his thumb over Joseph’s cheekbone, imagining the bruise he’d left there weeks before, but Joseph had caught his hand and kissed it._

_Jack had bruises of his own across his ribcage, ageing remnants of the beating he’d taken that night in the club, after he’d had Joseph bounced, and Joseph had stopped what he’d been doing when he uncovered them—much to Jack’s dismay—and sat back, crossing his legs, a slight and comfortable slump to his shoulders but a frown shadowing his face._

_“What?” Jack sat up, too._

_Joseph quirked his mouth. “You staying out of trouble?”_

_“As much as ever,” he said lightly. He refused the other man’s seriousness, wanting to lose himself in the feel of Joseph’s mouth, the sense of stopped time._

_Joseph pointed to the greenish blotches discolouring his ribs. “What’s that from, then?”_

_“Just a fight,” he said, leaning forward to put his hands on Joseph’s knees. “Want to take a closer look?”_

_“No more fighting, Jack. Not if doesn’t mean anything.”_

_Jack rolled his eyes, regretting the gesture even as he made it, for his mind said,_ I know exactly what it meant: I hurt you, so I had to find someone to hurt me. _He traced circles over Joseph’s knee and said, “Alright. No more fighting.”_

_“I mean it,” said Joseph, taking both Jack’s hands in his own, then pressing him down with a kiss against his neck, the two of them stretching out against each other. “I mean it,” he said again. “You’re going to get hurt.”_

_“I mean it, too,” said Jack, hands on Joseph’s hips, and for the night, at least, he did. “No more.” He was young, he was a prince, he had power and money. He was a soldier, too, and a smart one at that, and for the first time since Silas had trapped him on the steps of Unity Hall and hissed, “What you do with your_ boys _,” he believed he could find a way to keep every plate spinning and Joseph by his side until Silas—_ please, God— _was gone and his world opened up at last._

 

_And still he managed to square his jaw with feigned indifference when Joseph in the morning, squinting in the sunlight and looking to his lap, said, “Jack, I think this is it.”_

_“It?”_

_“I can’t anymore.” He had the air of someone who had rehearsed their lines a hundred times but never taken the stage. “I can’t keep doing this—”_

_“This?”_

_“This.” Joseph waved his hand. “Us. I can’t, not if I never know which version of you is going to turn up.”_

_“Alright,” said Jack, though it was categorically_ not _alright, he had given himself leave to love, to have this_ one _thing, and even here he wasn’t wanted. He forced himself to shrug, face stiff as a mask, and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Plucked his shirt off the floor, donned and buttoned it. Kept his back to Joseph. “Fine.”_

_“Don’t do that,” said Joseph, miserably. “Don’t make this a martyrdom, another scrap of evidence you’ll pull out in the night to prove that no one loves you, because_ I _love you, Jonathan Benjamin. I have for years and you know it.”_

_“Then don’t do this,” said Jack, his voice betraying the ruin in him. He rubbed his mouth. “Let me figure this out, give me some time, I have to find a way around Silas, but I’ll do it, I can if you give me the chance, if—”_

_“You_ hit _me,” said Joseph._

_Jack turned suddenly, fast enough to catch Joseph’s wince, and he realised Joseph’s fear and his part in it. He had made his lover fear him enough to flinch._

_“Fuck,” said Joseph, under his breath, and brushed his hand across his eyes. Then, louder, he said, “You pushed me down a set of concrete stairs, Jack.” Tension was visible in his shoulders and across his bare chest. “I bit through my lip. I chipped a tooth. You never called.”_

_There was nothing Jack could say; every word Joseph said was true. He had thought if he could just get Silas off his back, he could fix things. He had thought Joseph would wait. But Joseph needed to get away from him, needed more than Jack could give. He said weakly,“We’re done?”_

_Joseph nodded, his face twisted with sadness, and as Jack straightened his tie, said, “You have to go?”_

_Jack said, “The lights are on.”_

_“You could stay for breakfast, though. I’ll make waffles, I’ve got pumpkin and cornmeal in the cupboard.” He always kept Jack’s favourites in the cupboard, while Jack always did the cooking._

_Jack shook his head, trying—desperately—to stay calm, to be kind. “You still have that interview next week? That policy job?”_

_Joseph looked taken aback. “Uh, yeah,” he said. “I got a call-back from the stage-one interview the other day, and—” He blanched. “Jack,” he said, “You didn’t—please tell me you didn’t. You_ promised— _”_

_“My hand to God,” he said, “I didn’t interfere—I just wanted to say good luck.”_

_“Oh.” Joseph blushed._

_Jack thought,_ Don’t look down, look at me, let me see you for all the time we have left. _“Everything you’ve got in your life is yours, Joseph,” he said. “You earned it.” He admired this most, the man’s dogged determination, his refusal of the favours Jack wanted so badly to throw at him, if only so the rest of Shiloh could benefit from Joseph’s cleverness and passion as much as he had. “I’m so proud of you.”_

_Joseph sat in his bed, sleep-mussed and half-tangled in the bedsheets, arms wrapped around his knees, and Jack tried to imprint the memory of him, his skin, his legs, the press of him. He feared he was already forgetting._

_“Just tell me, so I know,” said Joseph. “Was it real?”_

_“You are,” said Jack, and he meant it, “the only real thing I ever touch.” He heard Joseph’s last words, “I’m proud of you, too, you know,” as he closed the flat door behind him._

 

***

 

When he wasn’t in negotiations with the Coalition or Jack out in the city, Jack quizzed David on current events, both of them catching up on Gilboan news together. Both of them exiles. David enjoyed the man’s company, enough to sometimes believe, even, that the feeling was mutual, and it saddened him that something as simple as an anonymous and solitary walk—out from under Silas’s thumb at last—could bring Jack such satisfaction. He wanted to do more to please him.

The day after their talk on the footbridge, Jack came in after dark and dropped the keys on the table. 

“Jack?”

“Mhm?”

“We’re going to meet Ruth tomorrow.”

Jack turned slowly, dropping his coat to the floor. “We?”

“I want you to come. It’s important that you and Michelle are represented.”

“Does Michelle know you’re taking me?  
“She disagrees,” said David, grimacing. Michelle had in fact disagreed so strongly that he had been forced to call her from a dirty pay-phone on the edge of town to make his case. “But she knows, yes.”

Jack dropped to the sofa and David joined him. “Thank you for being honest with me,” he said. “About Michelle.”

“Well, I want you there,” said David. He didn’t know how to impress upon Jack that it wasn’t pity or flattery, but that he honestly thought Jack a valuable asset. He was no longer the inexperienced hick he’d been when he first came to Shiloh, but Jack had personality. Finesse and strategy. “I’ve arranged the talks,” he said, “but I—They need to see you, who you are.” He wanted to compliment the other man, so he said, “You would have _killed_ as the press liaison. God, I wish that you’d had that job instead of me.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

_Fuck. Real smooth, Shepherd_. “Shit, I’m sor—”

“Aw, forget it.” Jack dismissed him with a wave, then said suddenly, “You faced down that tank, Shepherd, but I’ve been under a Goliath all my life, you realise that?”

David swallowed heavily. His lie had taken on a life of its own. Sometimes it seemed he couldn’t even remember that night at the front, that it was all a haze. But he knew the truth and could no longer stay silent. “I didn’t.” 

“What?”

“I didn’t—‘Face down a tank.’”

Jack only stared at him. 

“You can’t see it on the video,” said David, miserable, cheeks burning, “but I surrendered. I threw my gun away. The explosion was a fluke, dumb luck.”

“You’ve been _faking_?” said Jack, incredulous. “All this time?” 

“The only other person who knew was my brother, Eli,” said David. “You’re the better soldier, Jack, the better leader—You always have been, you command loyalty, you _demand_ it. I just got caught up in a hurricane, and I thought, _If I just hang on a little longer, I can go home_. I’ve only tried to do what I thought God wanted. I never wanted to take anything from you.” He had no idea how Jack would react and kept his hand flat against the arm of the sofa to keep it from shaking. 

But Jack only laughed. “I have to say, I’m impressed.” He laughed until tears started in his eyes. “This is it: Conclusive evidence that God hates me. As if I needed more.”

But David remembered how Jack had pulled Lucinda back from the edge, not for his own sake as he pretended, after, but for hers, and he remembered his courage in the field, captured behind enemy lines, and the glimmers of promise in him before Cross took over. And while he couldn’t—he _could not—_ go after Michelle’s brother, the uncle of his child, not in good conscience, Jack was courageous, no matter how he tried to hide it, and smart, with a mouth made for kissing, he was sure, and he _cared_. David knew he did. He settled for punching Jack lightly on the shoulder, as he had on the footbridge, congenially, and said, “God made you flawed, so what? You and everyone else.”

Jack turned away, biting his lip, and David thought, _If you couldn’t face down a tank, not for real, then this is your chance to redeem yourself. Come on, Shepherd, be courageous._ His year in Gath had been lonely, coming so closely on the heels of his separation from Michelle and his estrangement from his family, not to mention being forced to make his way in a foreign country. He’d had casual flings, sure, but he had too many secrets, too much baggage, for anything serious to work, and for all intents and purposes, he had left his heart in Shiloh. With his pulse hammering, he took Jack’s hand in his and kissed the back of it. 

Jack froze. Said, “What the fuck are you doing?” and David pulled back, flushed and stammering, “Sorry, I’m sorry.”

“Why would you do that?” Jack rubbed his thumb over his skin as though David had burned him. “Why would you—You’re not—” He shook his head, then blurted, “You’re in love with Michelle. You’ve got a kid!”

“I’m not—I don’t—” David frowned. “I—I can’t—I can’t explain, not without sounding like a complete douche.”

“Try anyway,” said Jack, drily.

“I’m not going to bail on Michelle,” he said. “Or Elizah. But Michelle doesn’t want me, not like that. We crashed that train, well, ages ago, before I went to Gath, even, and—”

“And you want to check off the other twin?” 

“No,” said David, “not at all. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t know—If I didn’t _hope_ that you might— I have always, always wanted to be your friend.”

“You haven’t,” said Jack; he had misery in eyes, looked hunted. “You can’t have—Why?”

“Why? You don’t remember, you had other shit on your mind, I guess, but when I came to Shiloh, I didn’t know anyone. I never even left Prosperity until I joined the army, and it’s not like I expected you to be my best friend, but I thought you’d get it, you’d understand what it was like to leave the front and come back to all that—glitter—and goddammit, I saved your life, I thought you owed me one favour at least.”

Jack stared at him, open-mouthed, but David couldn’t stop. “When I met you in the palace, met you properly for the first time, you were so nice to me, I thought—I just wanted to be your friend.” 

“Really?” Jack’s voice was quiet. “You mean it?”

David nodded, then grabbed the front of Jack’s shirt, pulled him forward, and kissed him, hard, and when Jack kissed him back, he slid forward, pressing Jack into the corner of the sofa, and the thing he had wanted was happening, and he murmured Jack’s name into his shirt-collar until the other man suddenly pulled back, looked at his watch—still breathing hard and refusing to meet David’s eye—and said, “I’m not going to be your personal project, Shepherd. This is not a redemption arc.”

“I don’t want to _fix_ you,” said David.

“Oh, so I’m definitely broken, then?”

He fumbled the buttons Jack had loosened back into place. “Couldn’t we just—”

“What?” Jack frowned. “Just fuck?”

“ _Try_ ,” said David. “Couldn’t we just try?”

Jack shook his head and stood up, but in their tiny flat, there was nowhere to go. He sat down again. They didn’t speak the rest of the night. 

 

The next day, walking slightly ahead to avoid awkward silences, David led Jack through the back streets of the Gath capital. Both of them were dressed casually, Jack in a baseball jersey for the city’s team, the Wasps, and David in loose-fitting khakis and a grey hoodie. They looked like all the other decommissioned, aimless soldiers ranging across the country—Raised on blood with nowhere left to draw it. 

“You’ve met this Ruth before?” Jack spoke without looking at him. 

David grimaced, then took a breath, hesitant, knowing that his silence said it all. 

“Oh my God,” said Jack. “Do you even know who you’re dealing with, really? All this talk about the Coalition and you’ve never even met her? We could show up for afternoon tea with William fucking Cross, and—”

“It’s not Cross,” said David, firmly. “I know it’s not and you’ll remember that the year you spent locked in your bedroom like a grounded teenager, I spent out here, building a network with people like Naphtali for a day like today when it really counted.” He stopped, both because he had no idea what to say next and because Jack looked like he’d been slapped. 

“Wait?” Jack lifted his hand. “Naphtali? _Ruth_ Naphtali?”

“Look,” said David, ignoring Jack’s question, “I’m sorry, okay? That was offside, I shouldn’t have said it, but I trust you, Jack, so I need you to trust me, and—” He swallowed, then went for it. _Fuck it, he wasn’t scared_. “I wouldn’t try to cut you down, Jack—I really, really like you.”

Jack was startled, mouth slightly open, but then rolled his eyes and said, “Well, isn’t this like being thirteen again.”

David flushed with embarrassment and clenched his fist, but Jack stood grinning and said,  “Aw, David, come on.”

“Don’t,” said David, through clenched teeth, horrified by how much of a _teenager_ he’d just sounded. “Just. Forget. It.” He rolled his shoulders, trying to shake off his shame. 

Laughter lingered in Jack’s voice and he said, teasing, “Come on, David, you could write me a little note, ‘Do you like me, yes or no?’ and I could check—”

“You’re an _asshole_ ,” said David He had kissed Jack on the sofa and thought—He had thought wrong.

“It’s not really my fault”—Jack shrugged, the picture of indifference—“if it’s taken you this long to figure that out.” He turned, hands jammed in his pockets. “Which way?”

“You’re only pretending,” said David, wanting to get some rise out of him. Just _wanting_. “Being such a prick, it’s an act, and I see through it, and I feel _bad_ for you, Jack, but I’m not going to forgive you.”

“I don’t _need_ your forgiveness,” said Jack, turning on his heel and shoving David back. “Or the lecture, so why don’t you just shut up and fucking kiss me again, okay?”

David narrowed his eyes, thinking he’d misheard. “What?”

Jack rolled his eyes again, then grabbed David’s sleeve and yanked him down an alleyway, gripped his waist, and kissed him. David stumbled, but anchored himself in grabbing Jack’s jersey, both of them falling against the building-side. Jack’s hands were on his sides, thumbs running over his hipbones, and David said, “Don’t fuck me around.”

Jack just grinned against his mouth. “Only if you say please.”

David pulled back, gasping, but kept his hands on Jack’s, still against his own waist. “I mean it,” he said, breathing hard. He didn’t want to be a joke or a distraction, he wanted—But whatever he wanted, it didn’t matter, not more than why they were _in Gath_ in the first place. He pulled away, straightened his sweater, and said, “I’m serious, don’t fuck me around—Do you want this?” 

“To shack up in a back alley?” Pain flickered across Jack’s face as he sneered, “No, not particularly.” The words were a punch, but Jack only said, “What answer were you expecting?” and  stalked to the top of the alleyway. He gave an exaggerated wave and said, “Coming??”

Still out of breath, David checked the street signs, turned them to the right, and fumed, disoriented by the wild oscillations of Jack’s mood. _He’s been through hell_ , he thought, arguing with himself. _But then, who’s to say he wouldn’t be like this anyway? No, he’s not ready, David, just leave him alone._ He squared his shoulders and said as breezily as he could manage, “One day, you’re going to thank me for taking you seriously, instead of going along with your _I-don’t-feel-anything_ shit.”  A cold October drizzle shivered on his face as the evening darkened around them. “Next alleyway, behind the club.” They turned. “I helped Silas because Cross was out of control,” he said. “Not because of you—If it had been another way, I wouldn’t have gone against you—Not after what you did for me,and not—Just _not_.” They stopped in front of a handleless door. 

“If wishes were horses.” Jack shrugged. “As they say.”

David rapped three times. “Stay back until I signal.” Jack frowned, but backed away.

A small man, hooded and in shadow, opened the door. “What do you want?”

“I’m looking for Ruth,” said David, and gave the code: “Her people are my people, her god my god.”

Tension left the man’s body, his shoulders relaxed, but his voice was irritable. “You brought a friend? You were expected alone, Shepherd, and we came in good faith.”

“As did we,” said David, eager to allay the other man’s concerns. “I swear, my friend, we all want the same thing.” As with Klotz and Boyden at the palace gate, he hadn’t entertained the possibility of failure until it stared him in the face. Ruth was their window into the Underground, not only its military strength, but also its intellectual power, young people of both Gilboa and Gath passionate for the same thing: An end to the war. He swallowed heavily, took a breath, and motioned Jack forward. 

Lingering in the twilight, though, Jack looked shellshocked; his face was was grimly pale, lips starkly red in contrast, and his eyes were wide. His right hand was clenched into a fist and shaking. 

David turned back to the doorkeeper, forging ahead. “I want Ruth and your people to be confident in our cause,” he said, “so I want you to meet someone: The Prince Jonathan—”

“Sweet holy God,” said the man, pushing back his hood. His face, surprising David, was round and young.

With a wrenching in his voice, Jack said, “It can’t, this isn’t—” He choked, “David, what the _fuck_ have you done?” 

David reached a comforting hand toward Jack’s shoulder— _Was he having another panic attack?_ —but was shrugged away. “What? What is it?” Both Jack and Ruth’s doorkeeper looked stricken, terrified, and neither moved.

Jack wrapped his arms about his chest, pressing into himself, and by now David recognised the gesture: He was fighting the urge to bolt. He said, “Is it you?” He was shaking, still. “Joseph? You’re alive?”

Relegated immediately and irrevocably to the sidelines, David could only stare as Jack and the doorkeeper—Joseph Lasile?—eyed each other.

“What do you mean ‘alive?’” said Joseph. “Of course I’m alive.”

 

***

 

Shepherd and Ruth were deep in conversation, and though Ruth paused to give Joseph a slight nod, Shepherd kept his back turned. Other than quick peek at Shepherd, Jack kept his eyes on Joseph and for a moment, the mask of Ruth’s poised advisor, her iron-set gatekeeper, flickered and Jack saw only the boy whose contagious passion and beautiful face had in equal measure once caught his eye. Then, a sudden avalanche, the years rushed back, and both of them were grown, with too much time and blood and hurt between them. 

“I went to your _funeral_ ,” said Jack, heart still pounding. “They put you _in the ground_.”

“But Thomasina said—”

Jack’s knees weakened at the sound of her name, but Joseph caught his elbow, his grip firm and sure. “What the fuck,” he said, “does Thomasina have to do with it?”

Joseph bit his lip, then looked over his shoulder. “They’ll be awhile,” he said, tipping his head toward Ruth and David. “Come sit down and we can talk.”

There were no chairs, so they sit cross-legged on the concrete floor like schoolchildren. “I’ve regretted that video,” said Joseph. “You can’t know how much. That _was_ my idea and I can’t pretend it wasn’t—It hardly makes sense, now, but I—”

“What if I said I wasn’t angry?” Jack had always been more frustrated with himself than with Joseph. “Would that make a difference?”

Joseph grimaced. “It’s just—I knew I’d lost you, so I wanted to give you a way out, if you wanted to take it. I knew you could crush the rumour in a snap, if you wanted, but if you didn’t want—I really did think you were courageous, I meant that—Even if I hated the wars you fought.”

“But what about Thomasina?” 

“You really don’t know?”

Jack shook his head. He had dreamed a thousand things to say to Joseph, if God would give him just one more chance, but every one had escaped him. He combed his fingers through his hair. _He’s alive. He’s still here._

“The morning after I posted the discs,” said Joseph, “she turned up at my door, four AM, with a Gath passport and a train ticket, and said I had three hours to get out of Gilboa before I had a run-in with a sniper.”

Jack tried to imagine what could possibly have motivated his father’s top advisor to help him. He hadn’t imagined her capable of such an act of free will, not since he realised she had broken her late-night kitchen promise—He had known as quick as being punched, the moment that Silas confronted him on the steps, that Thomasina had been the one to out him. Destroyed the last scrap of the trust he had clung to since his teenage years.

“She said—” Joseph hesitated. “She said _you_ sent her and that if I ever tried to come back or contact anyone in Gilboa, especially you, all bets were off.” He tapped the fingers of his right hand nervously against his left forearm, his old habit when thinking of something challenging or unpleasant, and Jack was overwhelmed with the urge, _his_ old habit reawakening, to catch and kiss that graceful, precious hand. When he closed his eyes, though, he saw someone else’s face. Another country boy. “I know my rights as well as the next student radical,” said Joseph, “but I was fucking terrified, and I believed her when she said she came from you—So I booked it.”

“I—Everyone thought you committed suicide.”

Joseph inhaled sharply. “I didn’t—I couldn’t—Contact _anyone_ , Jack,not even my family, not without risking them. And myself. I thought—”

“Well, Reverend Samuels gave you a very nice eulogy.” Jack tried to smile, knowing it was forced. He had seen Joseph’s parents at the service and wanted nothing more than to speak to them, to comfort them and be comforted, but his secrets held him back; they knew only vaguely that their son had crossed paths with the Prince, nothing even close to the truth. 

“You went?

Jack flinched at Joseph’s surprise, remembering all he’d put Joseph through. “Of course I did.” 

“And Thomasina never told you?”

He remembered her frosted disgust the day the bedroom door first closed on him and Lucinda. _Just close your eyes and dream of someone who’s dead_. “If I had to guess,” he said, slowly, “I’d say that Rose or Silas, probably Rose, ordered the hit, but she acted alone to get you out.” Twin forces of love— _Please, you’ve known me since I could crawl_ —and hatred— _You went against the family_ —warring in her heart, she had saved Jack’s life in saving Joseph’s, but never told him. “She probably held you in reserve, in case they really needed me to play ball.” And yet all that long year he and Lucinda had refused and  Thomasina kept this secret in her back pocket. Had she cared after all?

Joseph interlaced his fingers with Jack’s, reminding him in a rush of long years of friendship, high school, university, their secret letters while he was on his first tour and Joseph in graduate school— _I saw someone who looked like you the other day, of course it wasn’t and I was miserable for ages; New record time for gun assembly, by the way, and Elijah now owes everyone in the unit a drink for betting against me; My funding application was denied again and I swear I heard the adjudicator mutter, “fucking liberal queer” when I passed him in the hallway, the prick; New mission today and I don’t want to jinx it, but know I miss you and I love you; Be safe, be safe, I miss you and I love you_ —and said, “Did you stop fighting?”

Jack remembered his well-meant, half-hearted promise and shook his head.

“And did you get hurt?” Joseph was teasing-not-teasing; he had always been good at that. He saw into the hearts of things.

“A lot of people got hurt.”

“I warned you.”

“I know.”

“When David said Ruth Naphtali, your old prof—” Jack shrugged. “I thought that was shock enough.”

“Surprise,” said Joseph. 

 

Ruth shook hands with Shepherd, whose face was satisfied—if tired and pale—and the two rose from their table, still chatting. If Jack hadn’t been so emotionally exhausted, so deliriously happy, _he’s alive, alive_ , he would have been offended to have been once again excluded from the proceedings. To be Shepherd’s show dog. Especially after Shepherd had insisted upon bringing him, but it was enough—and it surprised Jack, that he found it enough—for Shepherd to be satisfied. For Joseph to be _alive._  

Standing silently, he scuffed the floor with the toe of his shoe. 

“Are you and—” Joseph shrugged in David’s direction and raised his eyebrows.

“No,” said Jack, realising too late that he’d answered too quickly. “No, no, we—  
He looked down. “Fuck,” he said, “I don’t know. I—” He didn’t dare say what he wanted, not to Joseph; he was not that cruel anymore. 

“I know what love looks like on you, Jonathan,” said Joseph, quietly. “And I’ve seen him look at you, and how, what? A dozen times since you came in here?”

“You with anyone?”

“I was, for a while. Not at the moment.” A blush crept up Joseph’s neck. 

“Don’t be embarrassed,” said Jack. “I want you to be happy.” He needed Joseph to have been happy, to _be_ happy. For his presence in Joseph’s life to have been a price worth paying.

Joseph bit his lip, then said, “I’m doing what I love, Jack, and it’s going to matter—Not the way I planned, of course,  but what turns out according to plan? Nothing I’ve ever done.”

“You and me both.”

“Seductively cynical,” said Joseph. “Now that’s the Jack I knew and loved.”

They both fell silent at that, and when Shepherd and Ruth joined them, the four shook hands. 

“Shepherd,” said Ruth, nodding briskly. “We’ll be in touch.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Shepherd. 

“And you—” She turned to Jack, pulling her long, dark dreadlocks back with a hair-tie.  Cracked her knuckles. “ Tell me, convince me or I walk—What do you want out of this, Prince?” She raised a hand to silence both Shepherd and Joseph, both of whom had opened their mouths to protest. “Go on,” she said. “Impress me.”

Jack waited, knowing silence was better than stammering while his mind whirred, then said, “I want to stop what Silas has done, what I nearly did—would have done, if I wasn’t stopped—from happening again, I want—”

She stared at him, face unreadable. 

“I want,” he said again, “the monarchy to change.”

Ruth clapped him on the shoulder with a hearty laugh. “Swear to God,” she said, “I thought you’d say you want the throne. But I guess Joseph was right about you, after all.”

Joseph turned a deep red, Ruth withdrew in the shadows, and Shepherd stepped out the door. “Until next time, then,” said Joseph, still blushing but giving a sloppy, two-fingered salute from his forehead, just has he done to tease Jack in his cadet years. _Is this how it goes, military man? Mmm, yes,_ so _professional. Show me again?_  

Outside the door, Jack turned, just one backward look, and his once-lover blew him a kiss. 

As they walked into the evening, Shepherd said, “Are you alright?”

A grin broke across his face and felt light and luminescent. _He’s alive_. “Yeah,” he said. “I am.”

Shepherd grinned back. “That,” he said, “what you did, said—That’s why I wanted you here.”

Jack pushed ahead so Shepherd couldn’t see the satisfaction breaking across his face. “So,” he said, “what’s our play?”

“Simple,” said Shepherd. “We’ve waited long enough: we’re just going to rock up to the front door.”


	4. Kings

_“All Israel and Judah loved David, because he went out and came in before them.” (1 Samuel 18:16)_

 

David, Jack, and Ruth led their team—six tight groups of four—toward the palace. Ruth had moved her cells across the border in stages, planting them across the city to await her orders, and more—sleepers—awaited them behind the gates. Jack and Ruth were both silent, shifted into military mode, while David—feeling his comparative inexperience—scanned their surroundings nervously. The Wolfsons had also done their part and the streets were silent; if anyone was at home, they weren’t showing their faces, for good or bad. 

They approached the main gate, its metal glinting in the early morning sun, and David spotted a figure dressed in red and white: Michelle, standing tall to address a half-dozen guards, a hand-gun held loosely at her side. The guards stood behind her, their bodies tense but their weapons at rest. 

Michelle raised her free hand above her and the guards’ nervous chatter silenced. “You made a choice,” she said, loudly, clearly. “You saw what was happening to our city, our country, our people, and you made a choice.” She turned from the guards to address David and the others; she was regal. “But you didn’t just choose me—My brother and I are united in this.”

David looked at Jack, whose mouth hung open slightly in surprise at Michelle’s recognition. “Look at them,” he whispered, nudging Jack. “Show them that you see.”

“Don’t tell me how to handle PR,” he hissed, but he straightened, stood tall, and looked out at the guards—Klotz was the only one he recognised—who risked everything to let them in.

“My brother and I,” Michelle repeated, “David Shepherd, your fellow Gilboans, _you_ —We’re united, because we’ve chosen the future.” She beckoned to Ruth, to all of them, and said, “Friends, the palace is yours, if you’ll fight for it.”

_Shepherd_ , the guards whispered. _Look, look, it’s David Shepherd,_ the _David Shepherd._ David tried to keep his head up, look at each of them in turn. 

“Stick to the plan,” said Ruth, directing her crew. “Non-lethal force until there’s no other option, got it?” They nodded, then dispersed. David would go after the crown, backed by Jack; the rest would clear the palace.

“It’ll get ugly,” said Michelle when he and Jack entered the gate, the last of the party. She faced David and did not address her brother.

At her elbow, Merab nodded and added, “As soon as he knows you’re here. He’s been sporadic, scattered, lashing out—For weeks, now.” 

“You be careful, okay?” On a sudden impulse, David kissed Michelle’s cheek. “Elizah needs you.” He turned to Merab. “Both of you, she needs both of you.”

“ _You_ be careful,” said Michelle, and then she was gone, she and Merab in pursuit of Rose. 

He turned to Jack and saw, for a flash, how close he was to calling out to his sister. But—“You know what you need to do,” said Jack. “So go. I’ll clear your way. ”

“Jack—”

“ _Go_.”

“You meet me here,” said David. His mouth was dry. “If we get separated, when this is all over you meet me right here. Meet me and we are going to have a very long talk.”

“Deal,” said Jack, but David couldn’t read his expression. “If you just _go_.”

 

The crown itself was surprisingly light, almost flimsy, in David’s arms as he ran alone through the Silver Gallery, remembering his disastrous, barely-successful rescue of Jack and Lucinda and praying that God was still on his side. During Cross’s coup, Rose had hidden the crown, but the symbol, now, was his—Was _theirs._ He took the stairs two at a time on his way down, eager to get out of the dangerously open drawing room below, then realised with an acid jolt that he had made a mistake.

Footsteps and voices sounded behind him.

_Fuck._

He ought to have crossed the _Bronze_ Gallery. 

_Fuck._

He didn’t have enough time to double back, so slipped into the window, nothing else for it, drawing the heavy curtain around him and leaving only a small gap to peer out. Silas and Thomasina stood at the top of the staircase, arguing fiercely, storm-clouds on their faces. David strained to hear. 

He had the perfect shot. 

He could do it. 

Except he couldn’t, not in cold blood, and he struggled to still his breathing.

“That’s an order, Thomasina,” Silas barked. “A direct order.”

“I can’t—Sir—” Her voice was ragged. 

David narrowed his eyes; she held a handgun, one like Michelle’s—Benjamin family issue?—in her hand, but had put her own body between Silas and the weapon.

“They have overrun the palace,” said Silas, “and I’ll be damned if I’ll be taken out of my own home in chains.”

“Sir, I can’t do what you’re asking—”

“For God’s sake, Thomasina, it’s a direct order, shoot me—”

David gasped, then clamped his hand over his mouth. 

Silas turned sharply toward the noise. 

_Fuck_.

“Who’s there?” 

David said nothing. _Please, God, please._

“In the curtains,” said Silas. “Out, now, or I start shooting.”

_It didn’t matter._ David tried to be courageous. _Even if he died, they had won. Be_ brave _, Shepherd._ He stepped into the open, holding the crown in front of him. _Man proposes,_ he thought. _God disposes._ The look on Silas’s face, the shock, the horror, the fury, was almost worth it in the moment before he snatched Thomasina’s gun.

He heard someone shout his name, _David_ , and it sounded like Jack, but it couldn’t be, because Jack was far from here, he was alone and about to die, he must have imagined it Jack Benjamin, sharp-edged and gentle and smart and beautiful, calling his name in the last moments before the gunshot.

 

***

 

Jack trained his weapon on his father, his squad filing through the door behind him. Years of training kept his hands still and his aim focused, but his mind screamed. _David, David, David, down on the ground_. One of Ruth’s people, a woman, he thought her name was Leah, held point behind him and he ordered her to check Shepherd. _David, what were you doing? You shouldn’t have been anywhere near this room._ After David had snatched the crown, they had separated, he and his squad clearing the halls of Silas’s remaining guards, and he had entered the gallery expecting to find maybe one guard, easily dealt with, then move onto the next room. Instead, he found Silas, Thomasina, and David, and he had called out, but—

Leah looked to Silas then to Jack, her eyes wide, and didn’t move.

“Don’t fucking waste my time,” he said. “I said go check Shepherd. And you—” He turned to Silas, who stood not ten feet away and still held a weapon, the gun he had snatched from Thomasina. “Don’t move.”

“You think this will work?” Silas poured into his words the derision Jack had heard nearly every day of his life. 

Even he could read the desperation in his father’s face. “It already has.”

“You think you can lead Gilboa? _You_?”

“Old man, I will drop you like a bag of dirt. Shut the fuck up.”

“Fuck you,” said Silas, and before Jack could say another word, before he could make another move, his father shot himself in the head. 

Thomasina shrieked and leapt back, spattered with blood and shaking bodily. 

“Don’t move,” said Jack. _Dead? His father was dead? Had that really just happened? First David, now Silas, what was happening?_

“If you pick up that gun, I’ll kill you.” He was bluffing, but needed her not to realise. Not to move while he processed this, while he figured out what to do. “Leah,” he shouted, “Tell me what’s happening.”

“He’s breathing, sir,” shouted Leah. “He needs a medic, but he’s breathing.”

_Thank God._ “Thomasina,” said Jack, “you have two choices—no, scratch that, you have one choice: walk out, now. Leave this palace, this city, this country, and never come back.”

She stared, eyes unfocused. “Where am I going to go?”

“Get a fake passport.” His anger, his shock, the energy it took to avoid looking at the body on the floor—He channelled it all into his anger toward Thomasina. “Go to Gath.”

The penny dropped; he saw it in her eyes. “Joseph Lasile,” she said, “is alive because of me.”

“And Silas would never have known about him if you hadn’t told him,” said Jack, remembering the foolish teenager he’d been, trusting her to keep his biggest secret. “That Joseph’s alive is the only reason you’re still breathing. I’m not talking about this, Thomasina. Silas is dead. You need to go.”

“But what I am supposed to do?” She scrubbed absently at the blood on her clothing, grinding it into the fabric; like Jack, she didn’t look down. 

“Close your eyes,” he said. “Dream of someone who’s dead.”

“Fuck you,” said Thomasina, walking backward toward the service stairs. 

“You will never have the pleasure,” said Jack. “Go find Klotz, though. He’ll help you.” Klotz was theirs, he knew, and had stood at the gate while Michelle rallied them, but he knew too that the man would not be able to resist helping Thomasina. 

She slipped through the door and Jack sealed the electric lock behind her. 

But he had no time to think, no time to plot his next move, running down the stairs, stumbling, and falling to his knees at David’s side. 

“Esther’s radioed for a medic,” said Leah, pointing to their other two squad-members, bent over their radios. “It’s not as bad as it looks, sir.”

It looked awful. David’s eyes were closed, his skin waxy, and his shirt soaked with blood. “It’s in his shoulder,” said Leah. “Right shoulder. It’s hurting like a bitch and he needs a medic, but it’s not as bad as it could be.”

Jack grabbed David’s left hand, clutched it, dizzy with relief when David squeezed back, however weakly. _God, he needed David Shepherd to make it._ “The worst is over,” he said. “You promised you’d meet me, remember? You promised, don’t miss it.” Leah and Esther stared and Jack didn’t care. _Let them_. “You need to hang on,” he said. “You promised.” 

David said, “I got it, I got it, Jack, I—.”

“I know you did,” said Jack. “It’s all over, you just have to hang on.”

 

***

 

Two weeks later, his arm bound in a sling, David searched the palace’s endless side-rooms for Jack. After limping resolutely through two wings and realising they were both due at a meeting of the provisional government in less than half an hour, he was about to give up, though he wanted Jack to hear his news as soon as possible. Preferably from him first. Then, behind the last door—

Jack sat in the window, looking out across the gardens with his knees drawn up to his chest, trying to disappear— _as usual_ , thought David with a pang of sadness—and said, without moving, voice flat and tense, “Rose is gone, isn’t she?”

David’s heart dropped; this was exactly what he’d wanted to avoid, the submersion of the person Jack had been finding in himself. “She just left,” he said. “She’s going out to her family property on the coast, and—”

“I’m not surprised she wouldn’t speak to me,” said Jack, leaning his forehead against the glass, “but also, I am. Does that make sense? Did she talk to Michelle?” Three empty glasses sat beside him. 

David was silent; Rose had sat privately with Michelle and Elizah for nearly half an hour. He didn’t know what they’d talked about. 

“I’ll take that as a yes, then.”

“She wanted to see Elizah before—”

Jack snapped round, his voice suddenly fierce. “Never let her so much as look at Elizah, you understand?” His face was blotched, teary, and David didn’t know if he ought to say something. He wanted to. 

“She already—” 

“I mean it,” said Jack. “From today on, be careful. You have always underestimated her—Everybody has, thinking she only exists where Silas is, Adam’s rib and all that shit. But it was him— _He_ was nothing without _her_.”

His lips were cracked and his eyes bloodshot, and David didn’t know the last time he had slept. 

“We’ll keep an eye on her,” said David. “I promise.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

 

_After Rose left Michelle and Elizah in the gallery, he had said, “You don’t have to go, Michelle doesn’t want you to go,” but she only said, “I despise you. He raised you up from nothing and you betrayed him.”_

_“God raises us up,” said David, “and God puts us down—He will for me, one day, if He sees fit. When He sees fit.” She had walked away, but he grabbed her arm. Said, “You protected Michelle when she was pregnant, I can never thank—”_

_Don’t patronise me,” she hissed, shaking him off. “You disgust me, all of you, I hope I never see you again.”_

_“I would never have killed him, Rose,” he said, without knowing how to convince her he spoke the truth. Behind the curtains he’d had the perfect shot, but he hadn’t taken it._

_She turned with no hint of defeat in her eyes. “I know you couldn’t have, Shepherd, just like Silas couldn’t deal with you.” She had ice in her eyes; he’d seen that look in both her children, but never with such lethal ferocity. “If he’d listened to me, you would have been dead in the ground years ago.”_

 

“I’m not like you,” said Jack, when David had finished. “I would have killed him.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I had a gun on him. He just got there first.” Jack was crying again. “Fuck,” he said, pressing the heel of his hand into his cheek. “I’m not upset, I don’t care, I don’t know why—” His voice broke and he hid his face in his hands. “Da—Shepherd, will you just fuck off?” His breathing was laboured; he clenched and released his fists, turning back to the window to hide his face, and David wanted to hold him. Tightly, closely.

“I was certain—” Jack said, voice muffled by his hands. “I mean—” He choked on the words. “She used to love me, I’m sure she did.”

David started toward him, said, “You’re supposed to be at this meeting,” but Jack bit out his refusal.

“Fuck. Off. Shepherd.” 

David went. He’d left a message on his own mother’s answering machine, but he didn’t know if anyone in his family would call back. 

 

***

 

A few moments later, the door opened again. A hundred rooms in the palace and still Jack couldn’t hide. “I said fuck off, Shepherd.”

“No such luck.”

Jack turned with a start to find Joseph a few feet away.

“Lucky you,” said Joseph, shucking his coat, “because I’m going to give you some free and unsolicited advice.” He straightened his stance, shifting into professional mode. “So forget I’m your friend.” Jack wiped his eyes and braced himself. “Let me do what I do best, because I know Gilboan politics, okay?”

Jack nodded. “But what are you doing here?”

“Ruth called me,” said Joseph. “Boss says jump, I say, ‘How high?’ But more to the point—”  He crossed his arms. “Both of you are lying to yourselves if you think there was ever a possibility that Shepherd would just ‘go home’ when this was over. Go where? The hero of Gilboa go back to some middle-of-nowhere Prosperity homestead? He’ll be the next king, there’s no getting away from it, and if you care about him at all, if you care about _Gilboa_ at all, you’ll help him.”

Jack said nothing. Gilboa, Shiloh, Shepherd—They were all better off without him. He felt, too, a cold wash of guilt for talking about such things with Joseph, who had borne such burdens on his behalf. “Why do you want to help me, the shit I put you through?”

Joseph tilted his head. “We had some good times, didn’t we?” He pushed the glasses out of the way to sit beside Jack. “And I think I got to know you pretty well.” He patted Jack’s hand. “Besides, this is my job, now: Ruth’s aiming to be diplomatic liaison to Gath, really get peace talks underway, and she wants me with her.” He put his arm around Jack’s shoulders, and after a moment of tenseness, Jack relaxed, resting his head. “We’re going to make this work,” said Joseph, “but if we are, I want Gilboa on the top of its game, and I know how good you could be, if you tried, so let me help you get there. And if you love him, you love him—Don’t worry about me.”

“He doesn’t want—” He was furious with his cracking voice, revealing far more than he wanted to share. Shepherd had kissed him on the sofa and he had pulled Shepherd into the alleyway, but what had that meant? It was only playing, stress-relief, desperation, a stupid game. But he remembered, too, their promise at the gate and the relief that flooded his blood when Shepherd squeezed his hand on the gallery floor. “I’ll get in his way.” Shepherd had no reason to want him: He had power, he _would_ be the next king, and there was every possibility Michelle would take him back. He had a twice-royal child, power, position, and most of all, God’s favour, a crown of butterflies spinning good fortune around him, while Jack brought nothing but problems. Silas’s poisonous legacy, the memory of the failed coup, scandal and shame. If he loved Shepherd—and he wasn’t saying he did, but _if_ —and if he wanted Michelle’s forgiveness, then the best thing he could do was to get as far away as possible. He wondered if he could survive exile. If Shepherd thought of him at night, before he fell asleep. 

“Ask him,” said Joseph. “Take a chance. He trusts too much and you don’t trust enough—You’ll balance each other out.”

“I really don’t need a matchmaker.”

“You’re right,” said Joseph, shrugging. “I’m sorry. It’s just—It’s not match-making, I just want to help you trust yourself. You’re the only that knows what _you_ really want. Silas wanted you to be king and you convinced yourself you did, too, but I knew you when all you wanted was to be a tweedy chemistry professor, and—”

“Don’t bring up that old shit,” said Jack, blushing. 

Joseph only looked at him, quizzical and sad, and said, “You know it’s okay to have dreams, don’t you?” He picked up his jacket. “Okay, I’m late for a meeting, but think about what I said.” He grinned. “Because this was a special deal: I’m not always going to be on-call for you.” 

“Yeah, I know,” said Jack. “Be careful out there.”

“Always am.” Joseph was gone as quickly as he’d appeared. 

 

***

 

Late that night, the meetings finished and the streets peaceful, thank God, David found his old piano in a basement storage room and delighted in playing it. With his arm in a sling, the music was weirdly halved, but it had been so long since he’d been able to play that he didn’t care, and it helped him think. Helped him compose a speech in his head. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed when he became aware of Jack standing in the doorway, but he paused, and reached his hand backward, beckoning.

When his invitation went unanswered, he said, “I can do this all day.”

Jack coughed. “Don’t stop on my account.”

David faltered, then withdrew his hand to play once more. “What do you want, Jack?”

“Uh—Michelle is—looking for you?” 

David knew he was lying, surprisingly sloppily for Jack Benjamin, but only said, “What does _she_ want, then?”

“I—don’t know,” said Jack, fumbling. “I, er, got it second-hand from Merab in the hall.”

Still playing, David shrugged and said, “I’ll find her in a bit. She’ll be down here soon enough if it’s that important.” He ran a flourish along the upper keys. “This is the piano that used to be in my apartment. Silas must have had it stuffed down here after I was arrested.” He spoke quietly, not wanting to startle Jack. Not wanting him to go. He knew he made an odd sight, hair grown back blond and spiky, jacket crumpled on the floor and still spotted with blood, his handgun next to him on the bench, but he swayed gently in time to his music, head nodding, feet working the pedals. 

“The first time I met Silas I was playing the piano,” he said. “I don’t think he ever remembered, it was years before Goliath. My father was dying in the Shiloh City Hospital, and my mother and brothers were in his room, but I just couldn’t be there.” He stole a look over his shoulder: Jack had wrapped his arms around his chest as he leaned against the doorframe. David thought of wrapping himself around Jack, skin to skin, then shook his head. _Focus, Shepherd_. 

“So I ran out,” he continued, “and in the lobby there was this great big piano, and my father had taught me to play, right? So I thought, if I can’t be in there, I can do this, and as I was playing, Silas came and watched me. Said it brought him peace.” He shrugged. “I realised years later he must have been there with Michelle.”

“I remember those days,” said Jack. “We were sure we were going to lose her and Silas wouldn’t let me—wouldn’t let anyone—see her. Except him. I remember standing at the end of the hall, screaming at Thomasina, but she wouldn’t let me through. We always had to wait for him.” 

David, still playing, said, “I first met Michelle over a piano, too.” He was so nervous, he fumbled the notes, but he pressed on. “It was upstairs, in one of the drawing rooms, at the party the night you and I came back from the front.”

“Mhm,” said Jack, non-committal. Then, “I remember that, too. You were so popular already and I just wanted to get the hell out of there. I hadn’t seen Joseph in eight months.”

“I was so overwhelmed,” said David, unable and unwilling to break his rhythm. If he stopped, he’d never start again. “It felt just like the hospital again, I couldn’t do it, and nobody knew the truth about what happened with the Goliath. So I was in this side-room all alone, playing the last thing my father taught me and Michelle came in and told me off.”

“Why are you telling me this?” 

David turned again and found Jack lingering on the threshold, still with his arms folded tight against his chest. When he stopped playing, silence filled the room. It was like breathing underwater. Compression. He swung round on the bench to face Jack, leaning forward with his hand flat on the tops of his thigh, and said, “I just thought—” 

“Thought what?” Jack had poison in his tone that went straight to David’s heart. “Thought I’d like to hear—again—how you charmed my whole family, as if I haven’t thought about you all—” He stopped, mouth hanging open as if he’d only just realised what he’d revealed. 

David said, “I only thought—Here I am and here’s the piano and here you are—And maybe this could be the place where _we_ first meet. You and me.”  

He held out his hand once more.

Jack said, “No.”

David dropped his hand, stung. Felt tears behind his eyes. _Shit, he was going to cry._ “I’m sorry,” he said. “Look, if you want Lasile or if you just don’t want me, I get it, okay, and—”

“No,” said Jack. “Listen to me. I said no, because this is not the first time we’ve met—We’ve got a world of things between us, and most of it’s shit, but if losing that means losing all of it, then I don’t want to. I want it all, every moment.”

David stared, vaguely aware that now his mouth hung open.

“This is not the first time,” said Jack again. “And I pray to God it’s not the last.”

“You want—This?” David lifted his hand, palm up, his carefully planned speech exhausted. “You want me?”

“Do you want me?” Jack stood in the doorway, achingly vulnerable. “David, tell me the truth.”

He nodded.

Jack stepped forward. 

 

***

 

David held him in a solid embrace, free hand bracing the back of his head until Jack pulled back and put his hands on David’s face, looked into his eyes, searching. He said, “Do you know what you’re getting?”

“Yup,” said David.

He smoothed a thumb over David’s cheek, over his lips. Kissed him. Pressed against him so they stumbled into the piano, set it clanging, and David laughed, then hissed with pain.

“Your arm,” said Jack, apologetic as David lowered himself to the floor, pulling Jack with him.

“It’s fine,” said David, tugging Jack’s shirt from his waistband. 

“This is a disaster,” said Jack. He couldn’t believe this was happening.

David, working kisses into his neck, murmured, “Yup.” He pushed the piano bench out of the way and the two stretched out on the floor.

“A disaster,” said Jack.

“It’s not my fault,” said David, “if you’re just figuring this out, now.”  Then he stopped. Struggled into a sitting position. Jack did the same and they eyed each other, rumpled and flushed, slightly embarrassed, both eager and reticent. David hooked Jack’s little finger with his and said, “This isn’t the only thing I want. It doesn’t have to happen right now. We have _time_.”

Jack squeezed his hand. Refused to let go. The room, Unity Hall, the palace itself—All were full of ghosts. In these buildings he had fallen in love so many years before, had put David on trial, had been forced to kissed Silas’s feet, had nearly been crowned. Run the halls as a child, played hide-and-seek with Michelle. Lived side-by-side in a box with Lucinda for a year, Lu with her iron core and infinite patience. Upstairs, Cross shot an innocent man, a public servant, while he stood by and did nothing, _nothing_ , but watch the last shreds of respect his twin held for him slip away. He hoped he could earn her respect again, but he didn’t know. 

He said, “This place is closing in on me.” He wanted— _needed_ —to remake it, make the palace home and hopeful again. Clumsily, he leaned forward, lost his balance and fell against David, who caught him and held him; he wrapped David in his embrace, gently, avoiding pressure on his injury. Kissed David’s neck and undressed him, felt David’s hands moving over his own body, his shoulders, his waist, the small of his back, and he said, “Here is good.” _Gasping_. “This is good.” _This was a beginning_. “Now is good.”

“Yup,” said David. Then, “Wait!”

“What?” Jack snapped up, charged with adrenaline and twisting toward the door. “What?”

“Shh,” said David. “Don’t move.”

“What?”

“Look.” He grabbed Jack’s hand. “But don’t move.”

Jack followed David’s gaze to the piano bench where a pair of butterflies had landed. “Well, holy shit,” he said.

David laughed.


	5. Epilogue: Constitution

 

_“And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” (1 Samuel 18:1)_

 

**Five Years Later**

Pulling on his suit-jacket as he ran down the steps, David shrugged an apology to Jack, who leaned against the car with his hands in his pockets, sunglasses pushed up on his head, impatience concealed not at all. He tilted his head back, rolling his eyes, too, when David tripped over the last stair.

“I like that face,” he said. “Can you try not to smash it up?”

“So sorry,” said David, out of breath and grumpily straightening his shirt.

“Don’t pout. And come here, you’re making a spectacle of yourself.”

David surrendered with a wry grin, let Jack adjust his shirt and tie, though still protesting as a matter of principle. “We’re only going to Merab and Hannah’s.”

“Shut up,” said Jack, “and let me make you presentable.”

“And usually dishevelment is more your bag,” said David, letting the suggestion hang. He was just as eager to leave for their friends’ cabin, but not so much that he could resist teasing. 

“Only if you say please.” He tugged David forward by the tie for a kiss. “Come on, into the car, I want to go the minute she gets out here.” 

It had been months since any of them had been able to leave Shiloh, or even the palace itself, for more than a few stolen hours’ leisure time and they were exhausted, though the results spoke for themselves: Earlier that week, Gilboans had elected their first prime minister under the nation’s first constitutional monarchy, replacing the provisional leader that had held the position since Silas’s death, with each province also choosing their parliamentary representatives and establishing a freshly-minted Cabinet, designed to work in tandem with David’s kingship. Jack had been working non-stop, drawing up plans and moderating negotiations for divisions of power and responsibility, portfolio by portfolio, from military to healthcare to education to public works, and most days, their schedules overlapped only in bed, with barely time enough for a dozy, whispered catch-up before collapsing into sleep. 

“Come to bed,” David had insisted the night before. “This can wait.”

“Five more minutes,” said Jack. “I’ll be right there.”

Ten minutes later, David had picked him up, carried him down the hall, then tossed him into bed. “I’m looking out for your best interests,” he said smugly, when Jack had stopped giggling long enough to pretend to be cross. “Go to sleep.”

Merab had returned to the police force and Hannah to her practice, but the lot of them were taking the weekend for a holiday, a luxury in itself, but to also relax with Jack, cooking, chatting, swimming in the lake (not to mention a goodly portion of time in bed), was a shimmering delight on the horizon. David couldn’t wait, for his own sake and for Jack’s. The man had been pushing himself, often too hard, in his eagerness—and if they were honest, his desperation—to make reparations to Shiloh and to Michelle. He needed a holiday before he did himself an injury.

“Also,” said Jack, “remind me when we get back, we’ve got to send flowers to Lucinda.”

David narrowed his eyes as he tried to remember the occasion. “Birthday?”

Jack raised a dark eyebrow. “Her doctoral graduation is next weekend.”

“Already?” The months—the years—had flown by. Jack had stood by Lucinda through the whole of the Dan Inquiry, the investigation demanded by the parents of the palace guard, Aaron Dan, the man Lucinda had shot. She had been found responsible, of course, but no charges were laid. _We don’t want trouble_ , the Dans had said, _and we don’t want money. We just want the truth. Officially._ That had been a difficult year. 

“I know, right? She said she didn’t want us to make a big deal of it, but I thought flowers would be nice.”

“ _Dr_. Lucinda Wolfson,” said David. “It’s got a nice ring—Make sure you put that on the card.”

“No, no,” said Jack, “ _you_ have to remind _me_.”

“You’re the King’s top advisor,” said David, patting his knee. “You work it out.”

Jack gave a small, serious smile, then said, “Okay, seriously, where the fuck is she?” His excitement was palpable, and David knew he wasn’t angry, even when he opened the car door and leaned out to say, “Boyden, can you or Klotz go find my sister and tell her to hurry up?”

David pulled him back into the car, calling, “Just ignore him, guys,” then leaned over his lap to pull the door shut. “Michelle is busy,” he said, “and instead of complaining”—he twisted round, both of them awkward but happy, all limbs, even in the limo’s spacious backseat—“you could make the most of your time.” He settled onto Jack’s lap, took both his hands in his own, and leaned in to kiss his neck. Felt Jack’s pulse jump. “See,” he said, between kisses. “Isn’t this a much more effective use of your time?”

Jack pulled his hands free, then grabbed David’s hips. Pulled him closer. “Fine,” he said. “Your husband agrees, but your top advisor thinks you should lock the door.”

“Michelle’ll be ages yet.” David fussed with Jack’s collar. One button undone, then another. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

“I just got you tidied up,” said Jack, still with his hands pressed against David’s waist, still—to David’s frustration—resisting untucking. 

The car door opened again, suddenly. “Oh for the love of—Really, guys?”

David turned quickly, losing his balance and falling half-off the seat, stopped only when Jack caught him at the elbow. 

Michelle climbed in and sat across from them, laughing. 

“Madam Prime Minister,” said David, with a deferential nod. Michelle had run an incredible race, and swept it. 

“Your majesty,” she said, still grinning, and to Jack, “brother dearest.”

“Sorry, sis,” said Jack. “Can’t help it. Madly in love and all that.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Michelle. “And if you loved _me_ half as much, you’d pour me a drink, but I don’t see any—”

“Fortunately for you,” said Jack, “I came prepared.” He pulled a bottle of champagne from a side-cooler, then popped the cork, misting David and Michelle with foam. David tried to hide his smile, so as to keep from embarrassing Jack or otherwise sabotaging the moment. The twins had long since been able to work together, but the wound between them, the poisoning of their old intimacy, had taken far longer to begin to heal.

Still. There were moments.

Jack poured three glasses, then passed them round. “For my sister,” he said. They clinked glasses, drank, and he added, “Really, Michelle: For you, the election—For everything.”

She smiled and said, “Thanks.”

David flipped the intercom and asked Boyden to start.  

 

****

 

They arrived at the farm just before dinnertime. The sun was low in the sky and Merab and Hannah were on the porch. 

Elizah, barefoot in a t-shirt and khakis, flew from the steps and across the front lawn, shouting, “Uncle David! Auntie Michelle!” She hurled herself at Michelle, who caught her in arms and lifted her, and David wrapped them both in an embrace, the little girl shrieking with delight. 

Still sitting in the car, leaning out, Jack watched them, delighted with their happiness. He waved to Merab and Hannah, who had come down from the porch at a more sedate pace than Elizah, and they waved back. When he walked forward, Merab gave him a hug and slapped him on the back. Said, “It’s good to see you,” and somehow, he wasn’t sure how, he could tell that she meant it. Hannah handed Boyden a glass of lemonade, and the uniformed man blushed and tipped his cap. 

Elizah was almost six years old, smart as a whip and bright, too, and had adapted easily and joyfully to having, for all practical purposes, three mothers and two fathers. Jack had sat quietly when David and Michelle hashed it out, having already told David his opinion: _Do what you think is best, I’ll back you up, no matter what._ And so Elizah stayed with her legal mothers, Merab and Hannah, and Michelle had papers drawn up to recognise herself and David as the girl’s birth parents. “She is never going to want for a thing,” she’d said, fiercely. “Not one single thing.”

 

Jack followed Merab and Hannah onto the porch, settling into the swing and gratefully accepting a glass of lemonade—“Spiked,” said Hannah, “as the kids say. Or something.” She winked.

“Just the way I like it,” he said.

David bounded up to the porch and fell into the swing beside him, while Michelle and Elizah spun circles in the sun. He took Jack’s drink and sipped it, and Jack made a show of protesting, though he didn’t mind in the least. He had realised, with the certainty of a lock’s tumblers at last clicking into place, a weight lifting, a held breath releasing, that he was no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

He took David’s hand and squeezed it. “It’s going to be a good weekend.”

“God, yes,” said David, leaning against the chair-back, head tilted back. He returned Jack’s glass. “There is literally no where else I’d rather be than right here.

“Uncle David!” Elizah was jumping up and down beside Michelle. “Uncle David, come on!”

Jack laughed. “Except maybe down there?”

David looked at him, apology in his eyes. “You don’t mind?”

“Go on,” said Jack, giving him a light shove. “You know I don’t mind. I’ll get you later.”

David kissed his cheek, then jumped off the porch to run toward Michelle and their daughter, and Jack loved him, good _God_ , he did. He settled into the swing, rocking with a push of his toes against the deck. Loosened his tie. _David fussed with Jack’s collar. One button undone, then another._ The hint of things to come. He sipped his drink and smiled, and the sun went down behind David and Elizah as they ran laughing through the damp grass. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Of course, all mistakes are my own. Thank you for reading!


End file.
